The Wicked and the Just (2 page)

“What about me? Thimbles, Papa, Edgeley was to be mine! Now I don't even have a dowry!”

My father hugs me tighter. “You let me worry about that, sweeting. In the meantime, you'll be lady of the house once we have our burgage.”

Lady of the house. Keys at my belt. Servants doing as I bid them. Like my mother once, at Edgeley.

“Besides, Roger has no heirs, and he still gets those spells from so many years beneath the Crusader sun.” My father looks pensive. “If we live quietly in Wales for a few years, who knows? I might find myself in possession of Edgeley after all, as will you and your husband when I'm gone.”

That year in Coventry was bad enough, chewing my fingers to pulp and waiting for assize judges and King's Bench lawyers. That year within walls was merciless without Plow Monday or Rogation, without Alred's Well and Harcey's Corner and my mother's grave in the churchyard, where the yew trees grow in thick.

 

I'm ever so weary of endless green fields and priory floors and travel bread. I want to go home. To Edgeley.

But every turn of the cart's wheels takes us a little farther away, so I ask the carter if he knows anything about the Welsh.

“Oh, aye, demoiselle.” His breath smells like onions. “A tricky lot, those. Say one thing and do another. Can't trust 'em farther than you can throw 'em.”

Charming. We're going to be murdered in our beds.

“Are they . . . Christian?” I whisper.

The carter smacks his lips. “After a fashion, I suppose.”

Even better. We're going to be murdered in our beds by infidels.

My father must not be aware of this. He can wield a falchion and knows a goshawk from a sparrowhawk, but he can be rather dim betimes.

“Oh, demoiselle, beg pardon. It was a poor joke.” The carter smiles like a dog that's used the hall floor as a privy. “Aye, the Welsh are Christian and hold Our Lord and His Holy Mother as sacred as we do.”

I pull my hood over my head. At Edgeley I heard Mass every day surrounded by Edgeley people who tilled the fields and drove the beasts and never once looked me in the eye.

“And don't you worry, demoiselle,” the carter rushes on. “The Welsh are harmless. It's been ten years since his Grace the king subdued the land of Wales, and there are over a dozen good Englishmen in Caernarvon's garrison. Walls like Jerusalem. Caernarvon's the last place there'd be trouble, mark me.”

 

Today I'm driving the cart.

Well, I'm holding the reins and keeping the oxen while my father and the carter rock and grunt and heft a wheel back onto the road.

The oxen's mouths pull at the strips of leather, as if all they want is my hand to guide them.

As if I'm holding the reins of the whole world.

I could grow accustomed to driving.

 

When we arrive in a town called Chester, my father hires a guide who has the temper of a sunburned boar. He smells like one, too. My father says we need him to pass safely, though, for he knows the Welsh tongue and every path within a day's ride.

“The Welsh tongue?” I frown. “You mean . . . they don't speak as we do?”

My father shrugs. “They're different from us in many ways, sweeting. Why do you think the king wants us there? How else will they learn to behave?”

At dusk, we stop at a rickety thatchpile house. A woman comes to the door and speaks to the guide in a tangle of sound that makes no sense, but our guide answers in a like manner. Then he tells my father that she's offering hospitality, and my father bids the guide to thank her.

This must be the Welsh tongue. When the guide speaks again I listen carefully, but it's as if someone stretched out his tongue with red-hot pincers and left it to dry in the sun. The sounds he makes are not like proper words at all, and I'm glad when he speaks in good English once more.

I suspected my father mad ere this, but I know it certes now. If the Welsh cannot even speak properly, we have more work before us than I wish to do.

 

It's late afternoon, right about the time we usually knock on someone's doorframe and request the hospitality of what passes for a hearth in this misbegotten land, when my father reins in his palfrey next to the cart and points.

“There it is, sweeting.”

“
That's
Caernarvon?” I put a hand to my mouth. “Saints, Papa, it's
beautiful!
”

No one said anything about a castle. And not just any castle. Possibly the loveliest, most elegant castle in all of Christendom. A wall of gray stone lit orange by the sunset, thin window-slits, high towers. And bands of purple stone threading through the gray like the finest embroidery. Where the castle leaves off, there spans a wall studded with towers. It looks like a subtlety of stone.

“But I thought . . . I thought the Welsh . . .”

My father chuckles. “The Welsh didn't build this, sweeting. His Grace the king did.”

His Grace the king has excellent taste.

Even the beasts seem to hurry. We stream down an incline toward a river mouth where boats bob against a series of docks, then we curve around the docks to the south. Little wonder. I can see no gate, only towers that bristle from the wall like cloves in an apple.

As we pass the docks, one of the brawny lads unloading a barge looks at me. Right in the eye, without dropping his gaze or ducking his chin. As if he's my brother. Or my sweetheart.

Tenants at Edgeley would never dare such a look. They all know better.

But I am a long way from Edgeley and there is naught to do for any of it.

We arrive before a massive gate, and the men guarding it approach my father to parley. My father hands over some silver and they nod us through. Above us, the city walls are as wide as several men lying head to toe. The walls are dark and damp and cold, but thick.

It would take a lot to get through walls this thick.

What opens up within the walls does not look like Coventry. There are no townhouses overhanging the roads, blocking out the sun. There are no muddy gutters and middens.

There are open spaces greening with furze and narrow plots with new-turned furrows waiting for May planting. Unfinished townhouses rise golden like solid honey, and older houses, gleaming white with limewash, sweep up from green plots.

I can have a garden here. Just like at Edgeley.

My father looks smug. “More to your liking, sweeting?”

“It's not Edgeley. But I suppose it will do. For now.”

The street we follow veers slightly to the left and ends abruptly with the city wall. We pass one cross-street, then another, ere the guide calls gee and directs us down the endmost street.

The castle is massive now. I can just see a curve of tower and a tangle of scaffolding when we lurch to a stop.

“What do you think, sweeting?” My father gestures to a house that rises tall and graceful out of a tidy yard. The bottom part is stone, the top timbered with bright limewashed panels.

“Is that our house?” Not a mud-and-thatch midden-hole, and certes a hand up from my uncle William's crowded lodgings in Coventry.

But by no means is this Edgeley Hall.

My father smiles. “Welcome home.”

 

A thickset woman of middle years answers my father's knock. She is Mistress Tipley. She and the servant have been caring for the place through the winter, and she thanks the saints that we've come through safely.

Mistress Tipley looks suspiciously like a chatelaine, when I'm to be the lady of this house.

At least she is speaking English.

“Sweeting, I must go see the constable,” my father says. “Let him know we've arrived and find out what he requires of me. Mistress Tipley will show you the house.”

My father swings back astride his horse with a faint groan, then bids the guide bring the cart into the rearyard and unload. I'm left in the foyer with Mistress Tipley regarding me as though I'm a child threatening the wall hangings with my damp little hands.

Being the lady of this house was promised me. I put my chin in the air and tell her, “I can show myself the house. You may go.”

Her face reddens, but she bobs her head and disappears.

Abovestairs is a chamber halved by heavy curtains. I claim the half at the rear of the house as my own; my father can have the other. There's a pallet on the floor, but I sincerely hope my father doesn't think I'm sleeping on the floor now that we're here. We can stay at an inn with real beds until the pack train arrives.

I throw open my window shutters and gasp. The view is stunning. The sun is all but down and the land across the shimmering water is a rich, glowing purple. Boats bob and creak below, tethered to docks that run along the city walls. In our rearyard is a scattering of outbuildings and animal pens and a kitchen garden greening like a meadow.

If I'm not murdered, this might not turn out so badly after all.

 

I trudge belowstairs in search of a place to rest my cart-rattled bones, and I come upon the hall. Salvo is already asleep before the hearth, where a girl about my size is raking the coals. She's dressed in unbecoming gray wool that has been patched and repatched with tight, careful seams.

The servant, like as not. And I am the lady of the house. Like my mother once, at Edgeley.

I wave a hand at the girl and say, “Fetch me some wine.”

Rather than leaping up and skittering toward the kitchen, the girl regards me so fiercely that my belly seizes up. Her eyes are dark as currants and unblinking as a bird's.

I stiffen from jaw to fists. “You will bring the wine. Then you will beg my pardon.”

The servants at Edgeley would never have dared to so much as raise their eyes to me.

And this girl is fighting a smirk.

“I am the lady of this house,” I say in small, bitten-off words, “and you are dismissed from it. As of right now. Be gone!”

I wait for her to cower and plead, but she merely looks at me as steadily as a saint. At length she returns to raking.

“Did you not hear me?” I wrench the grate rake from her hand and haul her to her feet. “You will leave at once!”

The girl's expression hardens. For a long moment she does naught, neither word nor deed, and I'm about to prod her with the rake when she turns on her heel and marches toward the rear of the house.

I'm looking for a place to hang the rake when the girl returns with Mistress Tipley, and the crone is bristling like a sopping cat. “Gwenhwyfar is going nowhere. Now give her the grate rake and let her get on with her work.”

“She's ill-mannered,” I reply, “and unfit for this house.”

“What's unfit for this house?” my father asks as he plods into the hall and tugs at his gloves.

“Her.” I level a finger at the girl as she studies her bare feet.

My father runs a hand through his hair. “Cecily, please. We're all weary. Let it lie.”

I sharpen my voice. “I'll not have her in this house.”

My father sighs. “If it'll make you feel better, sweeting, mayhap—”

“My lord, begging your pardon,” Mistress Tipley cuts in, “but if you dismiss Gwenhwyfar, you may as well dismiss me, too.”

I turn on my father like a whipcrack. “She's lying! She cannot leave!”

Mistress Tipley draws herself up straight. “I've breathed town air much longer than a year and a day, so I can come and go as I see fit. I'm here for wages, and with the borough's leave. If this arrangement doesn't suit you, my lord, I'll gather my things and be gone by first light on the morrow.”

My father blinks. “Christ, no. Mistress Tipley, please. Let's not be rash. Of course Gwen—Gwinny—of course this servant shall stay. And so shall you. And
no more
”—my father gives me a warning look—“will be said of it.”

The girl, Gwinny, slices a triumphant look at me as Mistress Tipley hands her the tool. Then she kneels once again and begins to rake around Salvo in long, taunting strokes.

I sulk on the bottom step of the stairs. I will see that crone Tipley on the street by midsummer. Her and her precious Gwinny. No one makes a fool of Cecily d'Edgeley and gets away clear.

 

 

A
KNIGHT
and his daughter, she said. No mistress.

More fool I, to have thanked God for small blessings too early.

No mistress, and new English might be bearable. No sniping. No accusations of familiarity with the master.

No insistence that I live in this town. In this house.

But what I get is worse again, and from a girl no older than I who stands there hands on hips, eyes narrow, brazen as a cold-water drench. As if this is her house already. Her grate to be raked. Hers from splinter to beam.

Wait for the master to slap her senseless. But he does not.

Expected a lot of things from new English. Did not expect to be ruled by a brat.

 

Long winter days, and I should have known better than to grow accustomed to the blessing of stillness. To grow to love the way quiet could fill space. To close my eyes one too many times and think mayhap new English would never arrive, mayhap this place could stay waiting forever.