The Vanishing Witch (7 page)

Edward could never see danger. He sauntered through life as if nothing could touch him, expecting all he wanted to fall in his lap when he snapped his fingers. And I gave him everything he demanded. I knew that if he didn’t get it I’d lose him. I smiled and pretended to be reassured,
but I knew that whoever had left that curse at my door had not intended it as a joke. It was a warning: a warning of death. I had seen such signs before and they were not to be ignored. But whoever Robert’s enemies were, they would not frighten me away. Like pain, you can use threats to make you stronger. If they hide a serpent in your bed, you must catch it and make it bite the hand of him who
left it.

When November takes up the flail, let the ship no more sail.

On St Catherine’s Day, men and women jump over the two-foot-high Cattern Candle to ensure good fortune, but if, when you jump, the flame is extinguished or you catch fire, this is a bad omen.

There is no doubt that there are a few disadvantages to being dead. For one thing we lack the lips to enjoy a roasted piglet basted in honey or the thighs to take pleasure in the welcoming
bed of a lover or the throat down which to pour a flagon of sweet wine. Those pleasures I miss dearly. Make the most of those delights while you still can, my darlings. But there are compensations for a lack of corporeality: the favourite pastime of the dead is watching the living squirm and suffer. And there can be few pleasures more entertaining than that.

Haven’t you ever felt a little quiver
of gleeful anticipation watching a man blithely walk towards a hole he doesn’t know is there? While you still live you may feel shame or guilt about letting him walk into danger, but when you depart from life you slough off guilt with your body, never again to experience a twinge of remorse about another man’s suffering.

And on that particular night Master Robert of Bassingham was about to suffer
– at least, he was if his dear wife had her way and, believe me, she’d had more practice in making his life hell than any imp of the underworld.

The silence in the hall was growing ever more chilling and oppressive as Edith’s needle stabbed viciously into the long, narrow strip of embroidery. On the other side of the table Beata was also stitching: the far more mundane task of mending linen.
For the hundredth time that evening Edith glowered at the great door as if it remained shut deliberately to provoke her. Beata knew her mistress was working herself up into a fury: her silver scissors snipped at the threads with the force of an executioner severing a head.

Beata glanced anxiously across at her. ‘Will you not take your supper now, mistress?’ Her own stomach was protesting so she
knew Edith must be famished.

‘I’ve already told you, no,’ she snapped. ‘If you can’t control your appetite you may go to the kitchen and eat.’

Beata lowered her eyes to her mending, trying to stitch while pressing her elbows into her belly to stop it rumbling in the echoing hall. She’d tried to ward off the storm she knew was brewing, suggesting that her mistress might sew in the small solar
above, which was much less draughty than the hall. If she had been able to coax Edith upstairs and persuade her to take some wine laced with soothing herbs, she might have fallen asleep and not discovered how late her husband had returned. But Edith had insisted on waiting in the hall and had refused to eat until her husband dined with her.

Beata had worked for Edith since her mistress had come
to the house as a shy, slender bride of fifteen. Robert’s parents had arranged the marriage when he was twenty. Edith’s father had sheep, plenty of them, and Robert’s was in the cloth trade. It was, everyone agreed, a perfect match. Beata had seen no more than fourteen summers then. She had gazed on Edith with envy – a husband, a house and in time, if God granted, children. It was not a future
Beata dreamed of for herself. The pox that had taken her parents had spared her life, but not her skin. Her face was as pitted as pumice stone, her eyebrows and lashes gone for ever and her eyelids, thick with scars, drooped so that she seemed always half asleep. No one had ever kissed her or, she supposed, would ever be tempted to. In those childhood days she’d wept for her face but had soon learned
that tears were too precious to waste on might-have-beens.

There was a rapping at the door. Beata sighed with relief. After all these years, she knew her master’s knock. ‘There he is at last, mistress.’

Dropping her sewing on the table, she hastened to open the door. Robert strode in, pulling off his damp cloak, his face flushed and wet from the rain. He wiped his brow and shook out the skirts
of his ankle-length robe, which was thick with mud nearly up to his calves.

Edith impaled her embroidery savagely with the needle and rose, gesturing impatiently to Beata. ‘Fetch our supper quickly. I’m sure your poor master must be hungry after working so late. I know I certainly am.’

Robert was not deceived by the sweetly reasonable tone of his wife’s voice. Her eyes glittered in the candlelight,
like sharpened flint, and even a stranger would have sensed she was furious, but still he tried to deflect her mood with an air of innocent cheer, which was no mummery for he was indeed remarkably happy. ‘Have you not yet had your supper, my dear? You should have eaten. You didn’t need to wait for me.’

‘A good wife should always wait for her husband to return before she dines. A man shouldn’t
eat alone, or so my poor mother taught me.’ Edith crossed herself, as she always did whenever she reminded Robert of something her late mother used to say.

But Robert did not need reminding. The querulous old besom had lived with them for ten years before she relinquished her grasp on life. Suppressing his irritation, Robert attempted a fond smile. ‘Excellent advice for a mother to give a young
bride, but after all these years . . .’ He trailed off: it would hardly pacify Edith to remember that the evenings of shy, romantic suppers were long over.

He wheeled to face Beata, who was already lifting the latch on the little door that led outside to the kitchen on the farside of the stableyard. ‘Why didn’t you serve your mistress hours ago? You know hunger brings on her headaches. Hurry,
woman, and fetch meats for her at once. I’ve already eaten, but you may bring me some wine.’

‘Don’t trouble to fetch food for me, Beata,’ Edith snapped. ‘If my husband does not wish to eat, then neither do I.’

‘Come, my dear. You must have something,’ Robert coaxed. ‘You know you’ll feel better for it. Beata shall bring you a hot posset. That’ll soon have you warm and cheerful.’ He crossed to
his wife and tried to kiss her well-plucked forehead, but she turned away and he found himself kissing empty space.

Beata pounced on this last suggestion. ‘I’ll fetch a posset at once, Master Robert,’ she called back, although she had no intention of fetching Edith any weapon as dangerous as hot liquid when she was in such a mood.

Robert strode to the fire and stood with his back to it, lifting
the skirts of his houppelande to warm his backside. It was a habit Edith thought vulgar, but mostly, as now, he did it without thinking.

‘Where’s young Adam? No greeting for his father tonight?’ He frowned. ‘The boy’s not sick, is he?’

‘He is well, though he certainly would not remain so if I kept him up half the night to wait for his father. I sent him to his bed hours ago.’

Robert felt his
own temper rising. She cosseted the boy as if he was still an infant. Another few months and he’d be out learning a trade, as many boys of his age already were.

Edith resumed her seat with dignity and took up her embroidery again. ‘Did business go well today?’

‘Fair, fair,’ Robert said, raking his grizzled hair. ‘We got a good price for the Lincoln Green from the Florentines, but I’m told the
river-men have started demanding a penny extra per cargo. Some of the merchants have already given in to them, devil take them. We have to stand firm on this. If any one of us gives in to these thieving knaves, it is that much harder for the rest.’

‘Is that why you had to work so late? You were meeting with the other merchants?’ Edith’s eyes slid upwards, watching her husband carefully.

Robert
hesitated only for a moment. ‘You know how it is, my dear. You start talking of shearing costs and transport charges, and the way England is facing ruin, and before you know it you’ve strayed into the latest gossip from the King’s court.’

‘Do tell me,’ Edith said, with an exaggerated tone of interest, ‘what is known of the King?’

‘They say the lad will go to Parliament at Northampton to call
for another tax to fight France, not to mention the Scots. Mark my words, John of Gaunt’s behind this. It’s his lands the Scots are raiding. He’s up there now, negotiating with them to save his own wealth not England’s. But young King Richard swore he’d demand no more money for eighteen months, and it’s been less than a year since he required funds for these wretched wars. The Commons’ll not take
kindly to that and neither will the rest of us, if we’ve to pay it. What the King should be doing—’

‘And what about gossip from nearer home?’ Edith broke in. ‘Did you discuss that with your guild brothers too?’

Robert was annoyed to be interrupted when she had asked him for news.

‘Gossip concerning a certain Widow Catlin,’ Edith said. ‘Are you sure it was the merchants’ table you dined at tonight
and not hers? You were seen twice in her street last week.’

‘I’m a merchant in this city, I walk twenty streets a day to do business. I dare say I’ve been seen in some streets a dozen times this week.’

Edith had abandoned all pretence at her stitching. ‘You were seen entering her house.’

‘By your cousin Maud, no doubt, who should be tending her own husband and children instead of squinting
through her shutters all day. That nose of hers grows so long from poking into other people’s business, it’s a wonder some bird hasn’t pecked it off. Damn it, Edith, first it was your mother, now it’s your cousin whispering the devil in your ear. Have you recruited every female in your family to spy on me?’

‘It’s a good thing Maud does take an interest in our family. But for her I wouldn’t know
whose bed my husband was sleeping in, though I dare say half of Lincoln knows and is laughing at me behind their hands.’

Robert, flushing scarlet, rounded on her in a fury. ‘How often do I have to tell you? I am sleeping in no one’s bed but my own. I have merely called on Mistress Catlin to offer her advice in certain business dealings and investments. She cannot be expected to understand contracts
or deeds.’

‘There is a plague of lawyers in Lincoln. Can she not employ one to deal with these so-called
contracts
?’ Edith spat the word as if it were a tainted oyster.

‘It’s the lawyers she needs protecting from,’ Robert said. ‘Once they fasten onto a man they’ll not be content till they’ve shorn him of every penny he owns, then taken his house as fee for doing it.’

‘And you’re the one who
has to protect this innocent from the slavering wolves, are you? Who appointed you her guardian?’

‘You seem to forget, Edith, that I’m master of the Guild of Merchants,’ Robert barked. ‘Naturally she came to me for advice. Isn’t Father Remigius always reminding us to seek justice for orphans and widows? In all charity I could hardly turn her away.’

‘I’m sure you could not, husband. Though I
find it curious that there are dozens of poor widows in this city but I haven’t heard of you calling at their houses to help them. But Maud tells me Widow Catlin is the kind of woman men find attractive. Tell me, Robert, if she was a withered old crone, would you be so quick to leap to her rescue?’

Words sting most when they strike a guilty conscience, and Robert was feeling their smart, but
the barb didn’t subdue him.

‘What right have you to question me as if I was one of your servants? I’m master in this house. Many of my guild-brothers rent houses for their mistresses and visit them openly. They even father brats by them and their wives offer not a word of reproach. Hugh de Garwell was a Member of Parliament and he has a different whore every night in the stews, but his wife greets
him with a smile and a good supper when he returns. I’ve never been other than a faithful husband to you, and this is the thanks I get – wild, spiteful accusations flung at me. Perhaps I should accompany Hugh to the stews tomorrow and then you would have cause to feel hard done by.’

Edith sprang to her feet. ‘Faithful! Faithful!’ she shrieked.

She whirled round as the door behind her creaked
open and the tousled head of her young son peeped fearfully into the hall. ‘Mother? Are you hurt? I heard you shouting.’

Edith bustled over to him, pulling him tightly against her and turning to face Robert, holding the boy in front of her as if he were a shield.

‘Nothing is amiss, precious. Poor little Adam, you’ve been worrying about your dear father being out so late, haven’t you?’

She forced
her narrow lips into a smile, though her eyes were as cold and hard as if they were painted glass. She kissed the top of her son’s head several times.

‘There, your father’s home safe. All is well,’ she crooned. ‘Come, sleepyhead, I’ll take you back to your bed.’

Still holding her son tightly she propelled him from the room, slamming the door behind her.

Robert stood dumbfounded, gaping like
a herring. It was typical of Edith that, no matter what her mood, the moment the boy appeared she pretended all was well, as if he was an infant who must be shielded from any unpleasantness. He slammed his fist on to the table. She had set his blood boiling with her accusations, then simply walked away, leaving him without anyone to vent his spleen upon. He strode to the door and flung it wide. ‘Beata,
damn you, I know you’ve been standing there listening. Where’s my wine? What’s taking you so long, woman? Are you treading the grapes?’

Beata bustled into the hall, her cheeks flushed and her eyes lowered. Her lips were pressed tightly together as if she were trying to hold back a torrent of angry words. She crossed to the table without looking at him and set down a flagon next to the goblets,
which stood there ready to be filled. She poured some and handed it to him, then strode back to the door.