NaGeira (13 page)

I give a soft, bitter laugh. How might things have been if John Rose had not arranged for me to live away from the settlement? Would I have aged into the same old woman? Would I be so despised now if the hush of tragedy and suspicion had not hung about my dwelling all these years? Would I be the feared and wizened creature I am now if I had drawn from the settlement below the love and laughter of the inhabitants as well as their secrets and shames? It’s as if, through long practice, I have learned to
maintain a private conduit to these people’s nightmares. Their darkness has fed into mine until my morbid tendencies have become chronic. I am an unwholesome old woman feeding an unwholesome town. And how can I deny that I led David Butt to murder? I flamed his unrequited passion. I fanned his desire until his own life, and the lives of others, meant nothing to him. Too late, yes. Too late for me. Too late for David Butt. And too late for Sara Rose.

Elizabeth is silent for some time. At last she shifts from my bed and stands.

“I am sorry for your trouble, Sheila.”

I give a slow sigh. Part of me still wants to tell her everything, to shed the dark burden of secrecy from my shoulders. Even if the penalty is death, it would at least remind me what it feels like to feel clean and unfettered. But I hold back, and Elizabeth is at my door by the time I answer.

“And I’m sorry for yours.”

I catch a sad smile in the firelight and then she is gone.

I sit still in my chair and wait for the dawn.

———

The night passed easily though it was cold. Both of us threw scraps to our new friend who darted and scurried in and out of hiding. The playwright talked a great deal and I hardly noticed the sun rise until our tiny cell was awash in milky light. Against my expectations, some of what he said was quite interesting. He told me of the play for which he had been imprisoned. It sounded vile and ignoble, a foul and infectious story. It would have made me
want to send him to prison too, if I’d had power to do so. And yet, it had a quality; there was something in the way he told it—a spiralling dread about what a man might be capable of once he begins on a certain path.

He told me he wrote compulsively and stored up plays for future use, for whenever the company needed them. He usually noted down phrases or sayings he thought clever. When he felt like it—and this could be years after he jotted it down—he might put the words into the mouths of his characters. I thought this sounded like a slapdash way of doing things and I told him so.

“I’ll not take the advice of a thirteen-year-old girl whose sole achievement in life so far is to find her way to Newgate prison,” he laughed.

“If being in Newgate Prison makes me stupid and ill-prepared for giving advice,” I said, “you might want to reflect for a moment and look around. You’re not in the Queen’s Palace either.”

He seemed pleased that I had learned to fence with words.

“Well,” he said with an approving smile. “I must be foolish indeed to ask this question of so rapier a wit, but what do you think of the way I told the story?”

“The one about the Scottish King?”

“It’s the only one I’ve told you so far.”

“If you think me such a fool, why do you want to know?”

“Fool or not, you are my only audience now.”

He shifted on his straw and his face seemed to colour in the dawn light.

“I liked it,” I said, knowing it was the answer he wanted.

A smile played about his lips. He put his hand to his face and scratched his beard.

“What did you like about it?” he asked through a yawn which seemed a little contrived.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Something about a single crime damning a person forever.” I paused; my bottom lip had suddenly become heavy as I realized the words might easily pertain to myself.

But the playwright, not noticing my unease, latched onto the praise. “Yes,” he said, sitting more upright, “a crime against nature and custom. A crime that curses generations to come. A crime that sends planets spinning off course while bloodshed and mayhem reign below, while men prey upon each other like monsters of the deep.”

He became quite intense for a moment, then pursed his lips.

“What else did you like about it?”

I thought for a moment, and tried to make my answer something more specific, and further from myself.

“I suppose it made me know what it would feel like to be responsible for someone’s death,” I said quietly. “The part about the dagger appearing before the murder. The trouble the murderer and his wife have cleaning off the blood afterwards. It made me understand what a guilty conscience would feel like.”

“You should hear the whole play when it’s finished and performed.”

“Will they ever let you perform it, do you think?”

“Oh yes, one day.” He threw a morsel at the rat which had re-emerged hungry with the dawn. “It’s just politics and power, that’s all. It changes like the tide. I’ll have my day again.”

He seemed weary for a moment, but then roused himself, running his fingers through his hair. “But too much praise is not good for me. You must tell me what you did not like about the story too.”

I was glad he asked me this, because I had some ideas about how it could be improved.

“The ending,” I said.

“The ending?” he repeated with a tense smile, tilting his head as though eager to listen.

“The king believed he was indomitable because the witches told him he could not be defeated by one of woman born.”

“Yes,” he said hastily, his eyes alive with anticipation. “Yes, but he did not know that his adversary, Macduff, was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped.”

“Yes,” I said slowly.

“What a finale it will make!” he enthused, throwing another scrap to the rat. As though infected by the playwright’s excitement, the animal leaped to catch the food, its whiskers bristling. “The mystical hand of chance stretching forth to snuff out the candle when arrows and swords have been unable to do so. What did you think of it?”

I don’t know why I listened to his words and ignored his clear meaning. I have since come to know that a plea for an honest opinion is really a plea for support and that no one ever wants to hear bad news. I had no idea of this when I spoke.

“It seems like cheating,” I said. “Just because the baby was taken from its mother’s womb before she gave birth,” I continued, “that doesn’t mean he wasn’t ‘born of woman,’ does it? He still had a mother. He still grew in her and was delivered from her belly
into the world. It seems like you’re just playing with words again.”

“Playing with words,” he repeated, his dark eyes fixing me oddly. The rat stopped eating and turned its head towards me. The playwright chuckled. “Playing with words, the child says.” The rat twitched its whiskers. “Do you understand dramatic irony, young woman?” The playwright’s voice was soft but infused with disapproval and hurt.

“It’s only the ending,” I said. “I liked everything else.”

I picked up a morsel of bread and threw it towards the rat but the creature scurried away to the corner as though the food were a missile.

The playwright ground his teeth and stared at me. “A play has to be a complete entity,” he said. “It must be the be-all and endall.”

I thought for a moment, repeating his words to myself, trying to make sense of them.

“The what?” I asked at last.

“The be-all and end-all, a neat package with no loose ends, a finished story that leaves its audience satisfied.”

The playwright was troubled now. I could see perspiration on his forehead.

“Oh,” I nodded slowly. “Is that one of your phrases:
the be-all and end-all?
One that you store up for future use?”

He didn’t reply at first but closed his eyes and looked up to the window. “Yes,” he mumbled hopelessly. “It’s one of my phrases.”

“It’s good,” I lied.

The playwright leaned his head back against the wall.

“I think I’ll go to sleep for a while,” he said, closing his eyes.

It was so sudden I thought it was a joke and that, in a moment, his eyes would open again. But they did not. Save for the soft breathing of my companion, the cell remained still and silent.

I played with the straw at my feet.

W
ith the dawn comes rain, and along with the constant patter and dribble, something else. Is the fresh presence the chill hovering around my shoulders now the fire has quite burned out? No, it isn’t the cold that makes me listen intently and shiver from within. It’s silence.

Why should silence disturb me? My mouth becomes dry as I search for an answer, and there is a sickly movement inside my belly. The rain drips and sloshes as it oozes from the sticks and dried grass that make up my eaves, and lands on the mud below.

It is a weekday, but nobody is working. Sara is still gone, but the search for her has ceased.

There is not the slightest room for doubt. Something has happened. Sara Rose’s body must have turned up. The community below must be in mourning.

How will it all work out? How obvious are the bruises David Butt left around her neck? It surely won’t take long for them to discover
that David murdered her and left the settlement to escape punishment.

But slow down. If Sara had turned up dead, would I not have heard a dreadful commotion? I was awake for most of the night, after all. If it had occurred during the short while I was asleep, the noise and activity would surely have roused me.

But the shadow of last night’s dream passes over me again and I realize that nightmares can absorb all that surrounds them. My dreams did indeed carry a flavour of unrest. Fires burned on the distant horizon. Cannon smoke billowed into the sky. There were booms and shouts. I saw my daughter Katherine’s face as a lean and dun-coloured pirate approached her with a sword. I screamed out so that I might escape this phantasm; I knew too well how it would end. Katherine’s hands were on the rim of the small boat and she pushed herself off, ducked from the whistling blade, and then ran along the pebble shoreline skimming water with her toes. I called out again, shut my eyes tight, and held my fists over my ears.

From time to time this happens to me: I find myself on the beach reliving a pure memory in place of a nightmare. This time the scene dissolved as I willed it to. I was in a valley again, not on a beach, and again I was watching a distant battle. Muffled yells were exchanged and I heard the desperate wail of a woman. I did not see the cause of her grief. Everything was smoke and darkness, but somehow I knew her family was being butchered before her eyes.

Suddenly I was back on the beach again. It was some while after the pirate attack. I stared at the waves as they rolled and lapped upon the shore. Drifting in slowly, bobbing on the surface, were blackened planks of driftwood, all that remained of one of our fishing boats that the pirates had set adrift.

When I awoke, my curiosity fixed not upon the unusual violence and horror of the dream but upon the one detail that had always puzzled me: I had seen the pirates set the boats adrift, and I had witnessed them floating away intact upon the random tide. They were still in sight even after the pirate ship had dipped beyond the rim of the world. How, then, did the remains become scorched by fire?

It was this point alone that I pondered while—before the silence struck me, before the yells of a nightmare suggested themselves as real activity below—I listened to the dawn drizzle. Now I am quite certain the dream battle echoed something going on in the settlement. The unseen woman who wailed in desperation may have been Elizabeth Rose, and the distant shouting might have been the general panic that ensued.

How long will I wait before I hear anything? If Elizabeth is in deep mourning, who will tell me? Emma, perhaps, but I cringe when I think of her visit and wonder what new demands it might bring. There are three or four people who might come to me for help in the next few days, but would they take the trouble to keep me informed? And would I want them to? I fear my blushes and wonder at the things people might guess.

Oddly, since I knew her but little until this business between Sara and David, the only person I’d like to talk to is Elizabeth Rose. She seemed to seek me for solace last night. Perhaps it’s because I too have been robbed of children. Perhaps it’s this grief that brings us closer. I think of last night’s conversation with her and I struggle to disentangle her words from the details of my dream. Her husband, Simon, overprotected son of the venerable John Rose, was not born of his mother like other men. Rather he was found while
his father was fishing. It sounds like a legend or a nursery tale, and I have to remember Elizabeth’s posture as she sat on my bed and the tone of her voice as she related this story. Only these details make me certain I heard it before, and not after, I fell asleep.

The wind outside changes direction; something comes loose from my roof and scatters down from the eaves, landing on the mud. A leak is certain to follow. I grip my chair arms and raise myself up. I hear the
drip, drip, drip
already as water hits my work table then splashes up, leaving a cold kiss upon my forehead. It could be this invasion of the elements that sends me to the door. Recently I have relied on Seth Butt for my repairs. But Seth will have his own troubles with David gone, and I am loath to set foot in the village today.

I draw my shawl over my head and open the door anyway, just to see the woods. The morning is fresh and cool and the leaves and grass stalks tremble under the falling droplets. I step out under the rain, I’ve no idea why, perhaps my rebellion against waiting. The scent of wet pine draws me towards the trees. I can feel the raindrops seep through my shawl and into my hair. My shoes soak up the puddles, but I’m not concerned. An old woman gets wet. Why should she not? There is no one who will fret about me, and anyway the forest is my friend. I slip between two wet branches, feeling a soft tug upon my shawl. Leaves hiss and scatter at my approach. I remember the words of the man of the forest:
While the woods embrace you, no spirit or beast can harm you, no strangers or neighbours smite you, no dank ague infect you. When death lies all around you, the leaves and boughs protect you.