The Corn

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  It didn’t, because he wasn’t licensed and nor was I, but Feep was completely delighted. He stared in wonder as I took him to the tailors, had him measured, chose deep blue broadcloth with lace trimming on both sleeves and neck, with lighter blue breeches. Navy blue stockings. And finally, small black shoes.

  When these new items were delivered, brought by a courier and all wrapped in ribboned linen, Feep rushed upstairs to change, and came dancing back down with a grin that almost split his face.

  “I ain’t never had new clothes in all me life,” he confessed that evening, sitting on my feet with his arms crossed over my knees as usual. “And these proper shoes. They fits, real snug. Real leather. Tis more than I ever imaged, cos – well – I just had me shirt and braes afore. Went wiv no shoes, or once I had clogs. Naught else.”

  Another first in all his life – he grabbed my fingers, squeezed, then in an excited gulp, lifted my hand and kissed it. I was so touched. I almost cried.

  “I’ll buy you a second costume soon,” I promised him. “So you can change every week while I wash them. You can choose new colours if you like.”

  Then I saw the tears in his own eyes. He sniffed and looked down, embarrassed. I wished I could kiss his little hand too, but of course, that would have embarrassed him even more. He gulped again, sniffed onto the back of his hand, but carefully avoided the lace of his new sleeve, and gazed up at me. “Tis like them miracles wot priests talk about,” he said wonderingly, the tears still glistening in his eyes. “You done – well – there ain’t no more of them nasty old geezers with their pricks waving, and the pain up me arse every day. I eats better than I ever did, three times most days, and that be a bloody miracle too. Chatting, all friendly, no slaps nor punching. Tis bloody gorgeous. And now this. Real clothes. Oh, mistress, tis a proper miracle. Tis you, I reckons, wot’s a proper miracle.

  We both went to bed, snivelling quietly to ourselves that night.

  But several dismal clouds had fallen on my shoulders, spoiling my contentment. First Lord Lydiard, calling himself my father. For days I refused to believe it but making my own decisions about reality according to my own preferences is the act of a three-year-old. So I have a brute for a father, but an angel for a mother, and must accept that the man I was to kiss can only be called my brother.

  The pale man did not come again to the apothecary shop, nor did he haunt the street and the riverbank, staring at me as he had before. But as clearly as any man might, he had asked me to sell him poisons, Yes, I have them and could sell them as my mother did, but already I am scared of accusations concerning the king’s death. And cruelty is not something I can ever admire. So why do I keep them? I know why. It is always possible that some awful event will make me pleased with my store of painful death.

  Now there is Bryte. He pretends to court me, but there’s something about him, kindly though he seems, that I don’t trust. Yet I’m a coward and won’t refuse him outright. As the owner of a new business, I do not want enemies who might destroy everything. I’m ignorant, and I’m cowardly, and I must be strong. “You’re so young,” Bryte says, “You’ll learn to love me.”

  Pooh. I never will. But I don’t think he’d ever hurt me, so I accept him as a nice man. Would a nice man in my life be so bad? At first, I thought Bembitt had sent him, wanting someone to spy. But Bryte is so different from Bembitt, they’d never be friends.

  Three ten-days back when I had first opened my shop, I had asked lordly customers if they knew a Jak Lydiard. It was a woman I barely knew, smart in a large hat and pale blue velvet who told me one day, “Ah, girl, I believe you asked my husband once about some young Lord Jak from the north?”

  I looked up at her stopped breathing, and nodded

  “Yes, lives at court. Grandest apartments facing the Corn. A pleasant young man, I’m told, and affianced to that Verney girl.”

  I gulped. “To marry?” I asked.

  She turned to leave and spoke over her sumptuous velvet shoulder. “Yes. It’s a good family, I believe, the Verneys. A fair match, since both girls are heiresses. The youngest is Reyne. I knew her when I lived at court. I’ve never met Jak Lydiard, but my husband says it’s a good arrangement.”

  She left, and I cried. Feep brought me a kerchief, muttering, “Wot, again mistress?”

  Sniffing into his kerchief, I admitted that I was crying once again. I could hardly deny it as my nose was dripping like a wine jug. “Yes, don’t bother telling me,” I snapped back. “I’m boring and stupid. Jak’s forgotten all about me, and he’s marrying some girl he doesn’t love, probably for her money or just because his father’s arranged it. That’s what they all do. They have to do it, tradition and everything, and I was an idiot to imagine anything else.”

  “Besides,” said Feep, “tis yer brovver, ain’t he? Reckon you ortta be glad.”

  True. But I wasn’t. I had spent too long imagining myself in bed with Jak, his hands between my legs and his mouth to my breasts. I didn’t know any more about how it was done, but where my body ached for him would surely be how men made love.

  “Anyways,” said Feep, “I done found sommint more important. Tis yer pale man. Symon reckons he come to him askin fer a couple o’ fellers to knife two lordly buggers. Symon weren’t interested but gived two blokes he reckoned was fine wiv knives and such. Then the pale man comes back and reckons the two fellers was useless and now he wanted poisons. Symon says no – bugger orff. T’was yer nasty pigswill wiv white hair, I reckons.”

  I couldn’t feel admiration for Symon having turned down such a nasty request, when he simply passed the job on to someone else. But it was Jak I was thinking about.

  I never knew Jak’s mother, but I know what my mother told me about the poison that killed her. Jak, thank the gods, didn’t know that. But I thought about poison, about Jak being my brother, and went to bed feeling sick.

  Feep says that what Jak will never know cannot hurt or shame him, either in this world or in the next. But I do not tell him that my own mother foretold that I would live with Jak and be his wife. Was she simply wrong? Or lied, to please me? And after all, the sin she hid from me was small enough compared to the sin of murder, for which she had been well paid, and more than once.

  “Best do what you wants, mistress,” Feep lectured me. “Wiv life never being a proper kindly business, a man must take what he wants and not wait for it being gifted to him. I’ll make a wager as sure as piss in the pot, them priests and so forth has it all wrong. What they gets up to back of the chapel sure ain’t the same as they preaches to the likes of us. All codswallop, it is. There’s a sight more sodomy in them cloisters than in the molly houses, and that’s a promise.”

  He never whispers his true fears, nor weeps for what was done to him. I remember that first night when he crept to my door, his skinny body sliced and bleeding as he shuddered from pain and fell from exhaustion and loss of blood. It must have been agony when it was done, poor child. And what of before? A little boy so used to suffering, he could remember nothing else. So I admit arrogance and greed is as much the province of church leaders as it is amongst the ordinary folk, but Feep appears to have no moral understanding at all, and I wonder if it is my responsibility to teach him some. Yet how can I, when my own moral education is suspect, and both my parents were murderers? So I reply with a prim sniff. “Your upbringing was sadly lacking, my boy.”

  “Hippo-crissy,” snorts Feep. “You wants a man in your bed – which is wot, being a female, seems fair expected. Then turns out the gent’s related. But the gent’s the same gent – the bed’s the same bed – and wot you wants ain’t changed neither.”

  “To sleep with my brother,” I now remember squeaking back at Feep. “Never. I don’t believe in some sins. But I do in this one.”

  “Stuff ‘n nonsense,” says Feep, happily consigning the entire church hierarchy to oblivion. “I reckon it’s all just a way for that high-priest fellow to charge for dispen-whatsits. Besides, wot if that fat gent in the greas
y velvet lied about being your Pa and it’s just a trick to get rid of you?”

  But I know he told the truth. A man who watched his wife die from the agony of the poison he fed her, is my father. The woman who brewed that poison was my mother. She also warned me away from Jak at first, yet then predicted I would live with my love one day and be his companion for the rest of my life. Had she told me the truth when I was little, none of this would be happening. And I’d thought her death meant I’d never know the hidden stories she implied and the secret truths she had promised me in the future. But now I knew them after all and wished I did not.

  Bryte was the man who now came courting, offering a good deal, even hinting at marriage. However, I was not going to entertain a virtual stranger, nor visualise an absurd and unwanted marriage to anyone. I had a knife for filleting fish and poultry, which would slice his heart from his ribs as quickly as it cuts butter, should he ever try to touch me. But he did not. As for morals, I remembered that it was another’s vice which had begun it all, for I had no right to the property where I lived and worked and had gained everything from Symon’s illicit generosity.

  When this unexpected flatterer visited me the first time, I was busy mixing lavender and soft soap for the eradication of head lice. He did not appear as though this was a medication he would ever have need of. His hair was thick and tawny, and he was a good looking young man except for his nose. Unfortunate, piercing and sharp, it seemed too prominent for the narrow cheeks and too long for the rather blunt chin. He was by no means tall but stood at least taller than myself and was well if plainly dressed. I approved the look of him. Having introduced himself, he told me he’d seen me many times through the window, a distant friend had suggested he come visiting, and he asked me permission to come again.” I’m not interested in being courted,” I told him rather abruptly. “But I’m always pleased to meet new friends.”

  Feep, who had naturally been watching from the back of the shop, later said, “Could do worse, I reckon.”

  “He’ll do nicely for someone,” I said. “But not for me.”

  Feep tossed his head and brought back the lop-sided grin. “Good fer you, mistress. I doesn’t like the bugger, but didna wanna tells you that, in case you was all maidenly keen, if you knows what I mean.”

  I knew exactly what he meant and agreed.

  The next time this gentleman visited the shop, he stayed somewhat longer, chatting easily about life well away from palace gossip. He was a little serious, seemed neither wealthy nor poverty bound, and led a respectable life of ‘Findings’ – being knowledgeable concerning where one man might discover what a gentleman needed. So he acquainted servants with new masters, the skilled man with those who needed such skills, shops with customers, and customers with the right shop. It was a manner of working that did not appear to be work, and therefore left the gentleman untarnished with the label of a working man.

  In spite of Feep’s disapproval and my own doubts, I began to rather like him, principally because he was invariably cheerful and spoke about new and more interesting subjects than I was used to. “Well, give the nob a go,” advised Feep. “No harm, is there?”

  “Master Bryte directly hasn’t asked me anything. He’s waiting, I suppose, which is diplomatic and polite. But it gives me no opportunity to explain my lack of interest.”

  “Womens,” muttered Feep.

  I hailed a wherry and jumped off at the Molly House island, but I found it dark and closed with a small boy’s nose peeping from a window, but no one answered when I thumped on the door. Surprisingly, Legless Alice was sitting in her doorway. I doubt if she recognised me. “I am looking for Symon,” I said.

  She peered. I was not his usual sort of customer. She said, “E’s out.”

  “Do you actually know this?” I asked. “Or do you just think it’s the right thing to say?”

  “Orff out,” she repeated, holding outstretched an unsteady hand. “But I’ll tell ‘im you was calling, if you wants.”

  I passed over the required coin. “Would you please tell him Freia came. Can you remember the name? Can you remember to tell him?”

  “I ain’t fuckin’ stoopid,” remarked Legless Alice, closing her fingers tight over the coin and disappearing back into the semi-warmth of the chandlery.

  Back on dry land, the back alleys, their shadows now sun-streaked, were filled with children. Some huddled small and forlorn on doorsteps, waiting hungrily for parents to reappear from the taverns, while some played hopscotch, knucklebones, or hurled bladder balls, sliding down the excrement in the gullies, chasing cats and pigs, slipping, falling, laughing, happy with a world now less grey.

  With no sign of dog or cockfighting, today’s market was only for shopping. Not even a puppet show, or a juggler had ventured between the busy stalls. At a stall I bought eggs with the nesting straw still stuck to their little warm shells, spring laid and now less expensive than in winter, and an essential part of both my medicines and my supper. I bought dried herbs. I ordered and paid for root vegetables to be delivered the next day. I wished I had brought Feep with me to help with the carrying, but someone needed to watch the shop, and after all, I had come not for buying but for private business.

  But Symon was not at his usual place in the market where he did his deals and met clients. Now having trudged enough and waited enough, it would be close to dusk once I arrived home, so I decided to leave. The market still buzzed, but there was no one I knew. The women of the Lower City, like myself, all came here to shop. Ladies came too, not for shopping but to watch the great muscled working men with their rolled-up shirt sleeves and chests bursting from their smocks, to catch a wicked glimpse of a cockfight and secretly place a bet on the outcome, well, many ladies came and never told their husbands, who also came, and never told their wives.

  Then I saw someone I recognised, the woman Betsy or whatever her name was now. “Symon?” I asked, not needing to explain further.

  I was surprised when she shook her head in a friendly but conspiratorial hush, her finger to her lips, and hustled me into a dark corner behind an empty stall. “Poor bugger,” she said in a whisper. “Got dragged off to the great Doom. Locked up fer cheat and theft. Accused by some bugger wot lied through his arse, he did.”

  I was horrified. “He’s a gang leader. Doesn’t that keep him safe?”

  “Yes, I reckon so,” the latest Betsy assured me. “But this were one o’ them mighty lords wot says he stealed. Fellow who reckons he’s king an’all. Kally somint. And Symon, well, he’s mighty angry. Reckon he’ll bribe a guard soon and be back wiv us. But tis bin three days already.”

  I stared, thanked her, turned in a rush and nearly tripped over my toes, and hurried home. Feep was dozing next to my cauldron, and the fire beneath had gone out. A nasty chill lay like death around my feet. made me shiver. It felt like an omen. I woke Feep and told him what had happened with Symon.

  “He ain’t,” Feep spluttered after I’d twice repeated the news. “That don’t happen to a bloke as leads every rotten gang in downtown.”

  “Betsy told me. She’d know, wouldn’t she?” I assured Feep that my dismal news was correct.

  He dragged his new fur-lined cloak from the peg, and passed me mine, just as grand and just as warm. “Can we visit, then?” I demanded, already half out the door, the key in my hand ready to lock it behind me.

  “Maybe,” he muttered, “but we gotta go there and talk to them there guards and ask when we can go see him.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Another island, another shadowed monstrosity, another gloom leaking into my heart and head while my stomach churned. And I stood there, facing the most terrible sight on the Corn.

  The doors were shut, huge as iron cages, but the guards could be seen within, dressed in black livery and well-armed with an unsheathed sword and knife at every belt. I stood at the barred doors and tried not to shake or stutter. “I know a man recently arrested and brought here,” I addressed the guard who was st
aring at me. “He is here, I’ve been told. I know him innocent, but I doubt that’s your concern at present. I wish to visit this man to discuss his future. May I enter?”

  But with a snort of debris, the guard plodded closer, shaking his head. “Your name, mistress, and his name,” he said, as if a chant he’d repeated a thousand times, “then you waits here whilst I gets an appointment. Reckon it won’t be today.”

  He was in the communal dungeon, a ghastly place I was quite sure, shared with criminals of every sort, some armed, their pigs and dogs, their whores and other women, almost no food, no privy even one to share, and little chance of release.

  The guard, taking his time without the least interest in whether he kept me waiting for hours, wandered back and lounged against the iron rails. “You got permission,” he told her, “but not fer a ten-day. You come back ten days from now, early in the morning, and bring food for the prisoner, and we’ll let you in for an hour. If you comes on the wrong day, you don’t get in. If you comes too late, you don’t get in. If you don’t bring nuffing useful wiv you, you don’t come in.” And he slammed the double wooden doors in my face.

  Waiting a ten-day seemed interminable. After all, I told myself, this isn’t my father. Indeed, I had originally wanted to speak to him about the pale man. I had no reason to involve myself in this dangerous situation. But then, of course, I had every reason. It was still all about the pale man. And also the friend who had changed my life with the most amazing gift. So I counted the days and knew when I should return. Then, disappointed, I turned to leave.

  A woman I didn’t know stood behind me. Waiting, I presumed, to enter the prison gates with an appointment already made, and she began to walk past me. But then she stopped, and looked, and smiled. I had no reason to stare at strangers, especially outside Eden’s harshest gaol. But for some reason I did. There was something about her face. I liked her eyes. They made sense to me in a way that made no sense.