The Wicked and the Just (31 page)

 

 

I'
M
pounding barley between two stones when Dafydd appears in the doorway. He's dressed for weather even though the sky is holding blue well past the time it should have hunkered down for winter. He leans on the frame, flashes that damn carefree grin.

“I've come to ply you ere I go to war,” he says cheerfully. “I've ten reasons why you should agree to be my wife, and I'll not leave till you hear every one.”

There's a swish and a grunt, and the brat lurches past Dafydd into the steading, slanting beneath the water bucket. She greets us in English as she sways toward the hearth with a long and purposeful stride. She does not seem to notice that her hem is caked with mud or her hair is streaming from its plait like a halo of snakes.

She looks nothing like a borough lady.

Daughter Shrewcy would be in pieces by now, weeping for her veil and her blistered hands. But this girl looks as though she doesn't even care.

The brat would care.

“Reason number one is—”

“I will.” My voice is low and steady. I thought I'd want my words back right away, but I don't.

Dafydd closes his mouth. “You . . . what?”

Now that I've said it, I cannot take my eyes off him. “If we both survive, that is.”

“I'd hate to think you were mocking me,” Dafydd says in slow, measured words. “I've never once played you false.”

“I'm not. I mean it. I'll marry you should we both survive this.”

“You'll pardon the question, but I'll not have you unconsidered.” His voice wavers. “What's happened?”

The brat wipes muddy hands on her gown, steps around the leaky place in the thatch, heads for the door with the water bucket. Dafydd steps inside to let her pass, then watches her stumble down the hill.

“Ah,” he says quietly. “The crack. Caernarvon just wants one.”

Dafydd kneels before me till I look up from my grinding, then takes the stones out of my hands and lays them aside. He pulls me gently to my feet and draws me into an embrace so deep it feels as if he's been saving it up, as if he'd never let go should the choice be his.

I curl beneath his arm and let him hold me, my cheek against his shoulder, and all at once I'm back in his bed, snug beneath the woolens and listening to the muffled beating of his heart, ere he single-handedly took on the task of undoing the English stranglehold on Caernarvon's privileges with the simple act of requesting a burgage. All these months, and he's still warm and solid, like city walls. He's still flippant, maddening, and irresistible.

He'd still have me.

After this is over, everything will change. One way or another, Caernarvon will never be the same again.

 

 

R
AIN IS PELTING
the steading as if we're under Heaven's eaves. The roof is leaking in no less than a dozen places, and the smell of moldy thatch is stronger than usual.

Gwinny is sharpening her meat-knife, sliding the whetstone down the blade in lengthy, irritable shings. She's in a foul mood because it took me too long to figure out she wanted me to patch the wall wattle, which I'm doing now, coated to the elbows in mud.

“When you're done,” Gwinny says in Welsh, “something something roof and fix the something something.”

I almost glare at her. She cannot be serious. Assuming I could get on the roof
and
had half a notion what to do, the rain would wash me away like all the sinners in the Flood.

“I hope your cousin never comes,” she taunts in English. “I'm growing quite used to having a servant. How idle and dissolute I've become. Almost like a fine lady of the borough.”

“He'll come.” I slap some mud on the wall hard enough to spatter my face. “I know he will.”

“You
hope
he will,” she drawls. “Wallingford's a long way from here. Anything could happen to the priest's boy. Imagine a lad that young trying to cross a countryside in revolt, to say naught of him finding one knight among hundreds. It's already been what, a fortnight? A month?”

I want to tell her to shut her mouth, but instead I picture the sun streaming through my workroom windows and spread some mud on her wretched walls.

Nicholas is coming.

He has to be.

“And what if your king calls him and his lord to the royal standard?” Gwinny presses a hand to her cheek in mockhorror. “Surely he could not say your king nay. And you'd have to stay here. Unless I put you out. I could always do that. How far do you think you'd get? Do you even know which way to go?”

If she's going to put me out, I would she'd just get on with it. I cannot contain a glare, and she's on me like a ratter.

“Don't you look at me like that! You'll be in the ditch ere you turn around!”

Picture the market. Picture the hall, the table set with broadcloth and pewter.

But all I feel is cold on my skin, raw terror in every direction.

Gwinny is smiling.

“You'd best hope it's the wolves that find you,” she purrs. “They'll merely kill you.”

“Stop it!” I fist up both hands and brandish the mud spreader like a dagger. “Do you take pleasure in this? Why are you doing this to me?”

And I freeze. Lower the mud spreader.

Justice for those who deserve it.

Gwinny rises slow, draws shallow breaths as if she's run to London and back.

“I'm done,” I whisper. “I'm done playing games.”

And I turn back to my task because there is naught like justice well served. Mud up my arms, over my face. No one can even see my cuffs anymore.

I've studied my lessons, but now it's too late.

After a while, there's a shuffling behind me. Gwinny crosses the small room, takes up a second mud spreader, and wordlessly begins to patch the walls alongside me.

 

 

E
NGLISH
collapses into sleep within moments of gobbling her corner of bread. Without the walls, labor is a ghost she has come to know painfully well.

Those first few se'ennights are the hardest, English. Ere calluses roughen everything on you and in you. Barely a month bereft, you're still pink and raw.

You'll have to harden, though. Even if you weep as it happens.

At least it's just you. You've no one who wept for trapped hares and maidens in nursery tales, pushed beyond your protection then and now and forever.

The steading is still. I withdraw English's length of linen from my apron and unfold it.

The linen is cleaner from several washings, but the shadow of a ruined Caernarvon still towers over the Holy Family. Saint Joseph and the Christ Child, faded but finished, all but leap off the wrinkled gray cloth.

Da went out. Gruffydd went out. Should I ever bear a son, he will go out. He will meet the same fate. He will die for this realm already twice lost.

English whimpers in her sleep. Her cheeks are wet.

The burgesses will come back and she will be among them. She will bring her husband into the privileges and tell him what to think of us.

I have not harmed her. I have not allowed harm to come to her. It's more than her lot has ever offered me, and English has seen what befalls them when they press the boot on our necks. She has survived the wages of justice through luck, mettle, and wit enough to open her eyes.

English finally sees.

If I'm to be ruled, may it be by those who see.

 

 

G
WINNY AND
I eat the last of the plundered bread. The loaf-end has deep finger-holes, one of which is bloody. I cannot look at the bread while I eat it, but nor will I stop eating.

The pile of blankets near the fire begins to quake and gasp like a rusty bellows. Gwinny drops her bread and flies to her mother's side.

The old woman's eyes roll back in her head and her tiny frame shudders as if throttled. Gwinny holds her mother down at the shoulders and kneels on the blankets to still her legs. The poor dame's face is bloodless and her blue lips stand out like leeches.

“Fetch the priest,” Gwinny snaps as she wrestles a piece of wood between her mother's clattering teeth.

I can barely find the stream. I shrug helplessly.

Gwinny groans like a wounded beast. “Then you hold her!”

The old woman looks like a corpse, all waxen and pale, but I kneel and gingerly lean my hands on her shoulders as much as I dare. Her shoulderbones poke like peg hangers.

“Hold her steady,” Gwinny says, and out the curtain she races.

Gwinny's mother jerks like a puppet on strings and there's a fresh privy stench. She must have loosed her bowels. I gag and retch but I don't let go. She's gasping low and harsh at the back of her throat and I beg her not to die till Gwinny comes with the priest, till she can be shriven and have her own daughter holding her head as she goes.

Her struggles are fading. I'm losing her.

I pray. I pray, clinging to the old woman's shoulders as I might a paternoster. I pray with my every fiber that she not die, not yet, not like this.

Something tugs at my collar. It's Gwinny, with a coldeyed priest hovering over her shoulder. I let go. I stumble away and they both kneel at the old woman's side, blocking her from view. I'm in the corner again, overlooked and passed by.

Rattly gasping drowns out Extreme Unction and the viaticum. Gwinny's profile stands out against the dark wall like a new-stamped coin. Tears slide down her cheeks and my face is wet and I'm in the corner praying and we're the same, Gwinny and I, we're the same.

 

 

I
BURY
my mother. All those who knew her gather at the grave and commend her to God.

English comes, too. She stands at my elbow and wipes away tears as four graybeards lower Mam's body into the frozen earth.

She's brave to show her face at this burial. My neighbors glare at her sidelong and mutter, but she does not look away from the grave. Her lips are moving. Her fingers, too, as if they're sliding over beads on a paternoster.