Her little smile was sweet, and I smiled back. We passed each other, I went away to the wherry landing, and she walked inside the huge iron gates, and that was that.
It was the next day when I decided to walk down to the docks. Here goods from all over Eden, and some even from Shamm or the outer islands, were brought in by sea or land, then loaded onto the freight trains, or even shipped up the Cornucopia and unloaded at the docks within the city. Prices varied, although I had no idea what those were. Beautiful things were on sale for lower prices, for this was no shop. It was where shops bought up their goods, and then sold them later for double the price. I had learned to do the same. Oils and perfumes, unusual spices and powdered crystals.
I had rarely been so courageous as to shop here before since the cargo sellers would stand high on their boxes and yell their wares while the crowd stood ready to shout a price, and the bargaining would begin with a noise like a dog fight. But this time I needed a distraction, something I might call fun, laugh at or buy some half-price treasure. I had even risked that ultimate shame of a sunburned nose. But although the day started with a bright blue sky and promise of sunshine, up came a blistering east wind, so, pulling my hood over my head, I tucked my purse out of sight beneath my cape, and prepared to hurry off to barter and replenish my stocks direct from source. Feep stayed to mind the shop. I liked the city bustle and my solitary wanderings and was glad to walk alone.
I joined in the clamour of buying, waving my arm in the air and shouting the price I’d pay, so acquiring some of the cheaper alum from the west I coast, cumin and oil of wormwood, vinegar and nutmeg, and a handful of precious cloves for grinding since Feep had misappropriated my previous store. Of course I was tempted by the sudden bright beauty of the painted pottery, the rare blue glass and ready dyed silks, luxuries I had rarely seen before; bales reeking of their own musky perfumes and woven fabrics staggering in their brilliance with colours which would have surely fascinated even Jak. Glass prettily tinted was for windows in the homes of the rich. But now I also gazed at glass fashioned into cups and platters and pots and even jewellery.
It was while I was at the docks that another unknown woman approached me. Dodging the crates, I had turned to leave when someone grabbed my arm. Pulling her back from the danger of swinging ropes into the softer shadows of the warehouses behind, I heard half her whispered words and guessed the rest.
“What is wrong with your husband? Are you sure it’s me you need for I’m no doctor, mistress, and not accustomed to visiting folk in their own homes. There are many proper doctors who will accept some service in kind if you cannot afford the fee.”
“My Lord is dying,” she said, grabbing at my sleeve. “He said to bring you. Only you.”
Surprised, I said, “I warn you I have no idea how to bleed a man, nor diagnose from the urine or by the moons and stars. But I will come if you tell me where.”
She became shrill. “You must come with me now, or it may be too late.”
I looked into the sad little face and said, “But I must return home to leave all these supplies I’ve bought, and more importantly to collect the medicines I need, once you described his ailment.”
She lowered her voice to a whisper again, but this time, I heard her quite clearly. “Poison,” she said.
It was a long walk back home and then to the small house in the Upper -City where she took me, but she spoke very little as we walked, and although I asked a hundred questions, she answered few of them.
Having first visited the shop herself, she had been so insistent that Feep had finally told her where to find me. “She blubbed all over my apron,” sniffed Feep when I got back there myself. “Kept shoving them coins into my hands. Well, what could I do?”
“She says,” I kept my voice low as the woman was waiting outside, wringing her hands and sniffing loudly, “her lord has been poisoned.”
“Then best not go near,” glared Feep. “Don’t sound like safe folks to me.”
“You think they might wrap me in a blanket and ship me to Shamm for the slave trade? Well if that occurs, Feep, take over the business and good luck to you.”
“No jokes, missus – them things happens. I should know,” frowned Feep.
Several hours of walking transformed the woman into a shivering bundle of fearful misery. Clinging to my side as if I might change my mind and desert her, she led me into the streets running back towards the Castle. The street led straight up from the Corn with its clamour of stalls, bargaining, rubbish heaps and bustling squeeze, but here at its first and widest part, the shoppers strutted instead of scurrying while the shopkeepers kept the runnels washed out and swept free each morning. Indeed, the west end of the street was positively clean. It was to a goldsmith’s business that she led me.
The shop was large and double fronted, but the shutters were fully closed and inside there was light neither from sun nor lamp. As the woman unlocked the door and pulled me in, interested eyes from neighbours and passing traffic shifted, then averted, pretended disinterest, then quickly peered back. The woman locked the goldsmith’s door behind me, and all the colourful ostentation was quickly extinguished by shadow. A glint of metal glowed, barely discernible. At the back there were stairs. Stumbling in the sudden dark, I followed the woman up into the front chamber above. I had feared just one thing.
But it was not Jak. For the second time in only a few months, it was Jak’s father. My father. He lay sweating and rolling on a wide canopied bed with his eyes wild and frothy yellow spittle across his chin. The woman who had brought me rushed to the bedside and grasped the old man’s hand. His fingers were hooked and stiff as if already in rigour. The dark room smelled with the familiar stench of acid urine and loose bowels and something else unpleasantly sour. I wanted to say, “When I nursed your son from an even more dreadful disease, you threw me from the house.” Instead, I stood straight, looking down at him and said, “Who did this to you?”
His pupils were dilated; black tunnels into terror. He spluttered, finding it hard to speak as his mouth was thick with bubbles of brown saliva. “My wife and her damned lover. Come here.”
I didn’t want to touch him. His breath stank. The sweat slipped around his layers of neck and into its folds like the grease basting a suckling pig on the kitchen spit. “How long?” I asked. The woman who had brought me now bent sobbing over the other side of the bed and seemed beyond answering further questions. “Days? Hours?” I insisted. “What have you eaten or drunk?”
Godfrey, Lord Lydiard, threw off the woman’s clutching hands and reached for me. His fingers closed on mine like a blacksmith’s pliers. “Last night, in my wine,” he said. “I don’t know what the devil it’s made from, but it came in a small flask. Green it was, green liquid with an acrid stench.”
It was another nightmare. Anything to do with this man turned into nightmare. I tried to reclaim my fingers, but he wouldn’t let me go. “But if you knew all that,” I said, confused, “why did you take it? How could your wife force you to drink something you knew could kill you?”
“Because,” he said, shaking now, though I wasn’t sure if it was convulsion or anger, “I meant to kill the bitch myself. It was the poison I’d bought. She found it. Put it in my cup and added enough sweet grape swill to hide the taste and the smell. After I drank the wine, she told me. Told me and laughed and locked me in this chamber. It wasn’t until Jesha came this morning I could send her for you.”
Now I was shaking myself. “Then why should I help you?” I demanded. “Have you made a habit of murdering every woman in your life? Poison is a vile death. Perhaps it’s one you deserve.”
The woman began sobbing again, but Lord Lydiard smiled through foaming lips and kept tight to my hand. “Every woman? No. I never hurt your mother. And I’m your father, witch’s bastard. So you know all about poisons, don’t you? It was your mother I paid to kill my first wife, even though they’d known each other for six years. Is it one of yours that’s killing me now? I bou
ght through another man and I don’t know where it came from. But I fancy it’s one of yours.”
“I don’t sell poison,” I stuttered, pulling back from the bed. “I never have. But I’ll try and help. I’ve brought antidotes, but after all night and most of this morning, I warn you, I think it’s too late” I pointed to the snivelling woman across the bed. “Will that creature obey my orders? So light the candles, three at least. And get me hot water, cloths and a clean cup.”
I knew. I thought I knew. I recognised my mother’s brew. This was her mixture of crushed dwayberry speckled with grated Monkshood root and stirred into undiluted Laurel water. A soft green liquid like dew from the forest, it smelled sour but dissolved tastelessly in wine. Once drunk, it started immediately on its track through the body, destroying as it travelled. My mother had called it butterfly and coded it ‘F,’ for death was sluggish but inevitable, and only a master would know the antidote. I was a master, but it was too late. All night the body had been ravaged by a potion meant to leave its victim conscious until the final moment, to know he was dying, and how, and why.
Yet if this had come from my mother’s store, I knew no way of it having been sold, nor by whom. Not from my shop. And if all the way from Lydiard, and bought originally years before, I did not understand how or why it had been unused and kept safe for so long, even to be carried, eventually, to the city. I could think only one thing – that Feep had sold it without knowing what it was.
“Jesha,” I told the woman who had brought the things I’d ordered, “now you must beat the whites of two eggs after removing the yolks. Then add one finger pinch of the powder I’ll give you. Beat the mixture until your arm aches. Then give the bowl to your lord to drink.” It was past the stage for a purge, but at least he could vomit some of the filth away. I had brought two purges with me, of rue vinegar, hairyhound and rhubarb in different strengths, and a tincture of ground willow bark for the pain. Throughout the long afternoon I administered these, repeating the doses endlessly, but it was clear the poison continued to do its work and I could not save the wretched man’s life.
At first, I didn’t care. He disgusted me. But then, in that fearful enclosed heat with the misery of the little woman Jesha at my side and the agony of the man who called himself my father, I finally hoped I might cure him. He rolled, perspiring and moaning, his great belly heaving beneath the bedcovers, throwing them off, then tugging them back in a fit of shivering. He remained conscious until finally, night drew in when he lapsed into occasional delirium and such violent sweating that I thought he would melt. But he was an ox and a brute, and his body withstood all the pain. While he vomited endlessly, Jesha held his brow and the bowl and soothed him. “It will be all right now, my love,” she whispered to him. “The girl is here. She knows what to do.”
I no longer knew what to do. When it had been an hour since his last attack of dry retching and spitting nothing more than a thin green slime, I gave him a spoonful of diluted digitalis from the foxglove leaf, and within a few minutes his heartbeat steadied and he sank back against the bolster and closed his eyes. Poison of course, but as my mother had always told me, a tiny dose of poison at the right moment can bring back life. So it was now. The rigid tightening of his hands and jaw loosened, and he sighed deeply. The sweating subsided.
I examined the rash spreading across his barrel chest, flat scarlet, burning hot to the touch. It was the final stage of the dwayberry poison, and I did not think I could contradict it. I gave another drink of the expensive white powder; my best ground poppy. Not enough to cause vomiting this time but enough to bring some relief, a small antidote to the syrup of the evil purple berries he had drunk. Then, drugged and exhausted, finally he slept. I pulled up a big-armed chair to the bedside and curled there, watching the deep rise of his breathing, the rattle of exhalation and the mutter of inconstant delirium. The shadows flared across the rugs and tapestries and the heavy hangings of the bed. It was a large luxurious chamber, worthy of the goldsmith’s business below. The ceiling beams threw down their own huge black stripes over the shuddering flicker of the candle flames. Then the room seemed monstrous. I remembered other rooms, other times, other fears. Amongst my thoughts was the surprise that my mother had ever wanted this man and had bedded him. Had she simply wanted a lord in her arms? But she had never seemed that way to me and had been impressed by nothing.
“You’re his lover,” I said to the woman.
Jesha stared back. Her eyes were reddened, her concave cheeks still wet. She nodded. “For years,” she whispered, as if frightened to wake him. “Forever.”
“Then I have to tell you,” I whispered too, “I am quite sure he will die.”
She started to cry again. “But everything you’ve done? And he said you would be able to heal him. He said you were the best doctor he’s ever known.”
“Then he hasn’t known many,” I said, curt. “But I do know about poisons. So does he.”
She gave me the answer I was hoping for. “I know,” she murmured. “I was with my dearest lord when his first wife died. I have been with him since I was little more than a child. He took me from the fields to the pantries and then into his bed. I have been with him ever since. I know all his life.”
“Then you know he deserves this,” I said, staring straight into her wavering watery eyes.
“Never,” she answered, clutching at his hand which now lay relaxed and motionless on the quilt. “How can you say that of your own father? You were born out of wedlock, as I was, but he sired you. You owe him your life.”
“He murdered his first wife,” I said. I didn’t want to talk to this woman about Jak and said nothing of the child left motherless back then. “Now he planned to murder his second. He poisoned the first to marry the second. Why did he want to murder again? To marry you?”
Jesha blinked back her tears. “His first wife deserved to die. Lady Sara was arrogant and cruel. This woman is worse. But he would never marry me, although he’s loved me for years. As a child, I worked in his fields. I milked his cows. I picked his barley. I helped in his haymaking.” She was proud now, leaning back, sighing as she related her life to me. I let her talk as it clearly brought her comfort. She began to smile, that silly lost simper of an aged woman recounting the love of her youth. “I’d always loved him as my lord and master,” she went on softly. “Then it was the double moon day. I’d spent the morning since dawn collecting eggs. Strange to remember what I thought then, fingers sore, back sore, just working on into the heat of midday as I always did. Never knowing how my life was about to change, and how nothing would ever be the same again. At twilight, there was dancing around the maypole with all the village children and our beautiful lord came down to offer ale and raisins.” She was misty-eyed and I smiled to myself. How she looked was probably how I looked when I thought about Jak. “He was such a handsome man,” Jesha continued. “Perhaps you only knew him later. He’s grown a little stocky perhaps. That’s the risk of good living. But he’s still fine and strong.”
I looked at the face lying back on the pillows before me. The heavy lids ended in a short frosting of fair lashes now closed over the swathes of puffy fat. A face of spreading layers tumbling into loose jowls, multiple chins each with a scratch of greying stubble. Every line and fold spelt degenerate living and irascible temper. Now approaching death brought a purpling beneath the eyes, a sinking of the rounded cheeks, a pinch to the flared nostrils. But it was a face of excess. “You must love your lord indeed, to call that handsome,” I said without spite.
Jesha bent over the bed and kissed his forehead, smoothing back the wisps of sweat mired hair. I realised then, as I had never bothered to consider before, that the man had my colouring. Light brown hair with a curl around the face. Eyes, though closed now, cold hazel; brown behind gold. Wolf’s eyes.
“A mature man is entitled to gain a little flesh,” insisted Jesha, as if it mattered to prove to me this man’s worth. “But you call him my lord, though he is also your
lord and your father,” her voice back to a whisper. “Won’t you acknowledge him as your sire?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve never needed a father, and I don’t want one now. Certainly not this one.” So she’d been a Lydiard child as I had, this silly, fluttering, wretched Jesha. And when she was a child indeed and still a long way from her womanhood, her pompous lord had seduced her, taken her into his house to work in the bakehouses and laundries. He had kept her with him through two marriages, the birth of his legitimate son and heir, an affair with the local wise woman and the birth of a bastard daughter. Finally, she had followed him in his transference to the Royal Court. But I had never known her and doubted if I had ever even seen her. I wondered if Jak knew who she was.
Indeed, she told me, this was Jesha’s house, and not his, that we sat in now. Lord Lydiard had finally arranged a marriage of convenience for her, to a goldsmith in exchange for money, patronage and favours. Jesha had become respectable and comfortably affluent, while with her husband’s compliance, she remained my father’s lover.
Chapter Twenty-Three
More interesting perhaps to wonder why Lady Lydiard had planned to murder her husband. Probably because she discovered his intentions towards her. Certainly not because of his mistress. That had already been as accepted as all normal court practises. Adultery, abhorred by a church that preached ghastly after-death punishment, was in practice considered just as essential for general comfort as a mug of ale for breakfast. I’d been told that and although this was Jesha’s house, being her legitimate husband’s home and business, Lord Lydiard clearly often slept here with his mistress, or even in the master chamber without her. It hardly surprised me. But it surprised me that Lady Lydiard also came here, had been here the evening before, administering wine and meat as if the place and the right were her own. My father’s habits, I decided, were as unattractive as I had always imagined them.
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