The Plague Charmer Read online

  If Christina’s mother could have been sure that the child was not Randel’s, Oswin would never have drawn breath, and maybe Christina would have died with him. She often lay awake in that turret room wondering if Eda would have procured some poison, or if her mother would have done the deed with her own hand. Throughout her childhood, she had felt her mother’s whip descend mercilessly on her fragile little body enough times to know that she was more than capable of coldly dispatching both daughter and grandson should it prove necessary. Death before dishonour: that was the code of chivalry.

  But until Randel had returned from France to settle the matter, Christina’s mother was taking no chances. No word of Christina’s condition or her banishment to Porlock would reach him there. Blessed and Holy Virgin, let him never return to learn of it. But the words had barely been whispered to the empty chamber before Christina shuddered with the horror of what she had said. To pray for a man’s death must be a terrible sin, and to pray for your own husband’s death – that was nothing short of treason.

  Randel was the son-in-law of every mother’s dreams, gilded with enough lands and manors to satisfy even the most avaricious dowager. It had been a marriage Christina’s mother had long schemed to bring about. And if Randel publicly acknowledged the boy to be his son, she’d be only too eager to boast of a daughter so fecund that noble sons came tumbling from her belly after only a single night in the marriage bed. For once in her life, she might even praise Christina.

  But if Randel refused to acknowledge the child as his own . . . Christina shivered once more. Unbidden her hand strayed to her shoulder. The bruises had faded months ago, but not the memory. One night over dinner in her uncle’s great hall she had innocently offered the last two lines of a poem about a knight, which Randel, in his cups, had misquoted. He’d laughed when those around had praised his betrothed’s sharp wits and joked he should take care he did not find himself impaled on the point of them. But later in the garden, when she found herself alone with him, his words had turned savage and his fist merciless.

  Suppose Randel had now found a wealthier match or a woman he lusted after, it would be easy for him to rid himself of an inconvenient wife by denying the boy and proclaiming his mother unfaithful. Not even her uncle’s favoured position would save Christina then. Indeed, it would make her dishonour worse. She would be forced to do public penance, so that all the world could see her shame, then be walled up in a nunnery till she withered and died. Her son would be sold to a tanner to spend his life collecting dog dung. That was if they were both lucky.

  Christina knew only too well that a girl suffering from oppression of the spleen could make a full and miraculous recovery, but just as easily such a malady could suddenly prove fatal.

  Chapter 4

  Matilda

  St Antony is the patron saint of swineherds and he cures ailments of the skin, for pork fat is a fair remedy for such maladies.

  The shutter rattled violently in the gust of wind. The leather hinge was almost cracked through, but there was no one to mend it. My husband should have attended to it before he went back to sea. There is much he should have seen to before he departed. He was a ship’s carpenter, and had the smallest peg wanted hammering in on the hull, or a sea-hatch needed rehanging, it would have been done before the master had finished giving the order, but he never stirred himself to mend half the things that needed seeing to in my cottage, even when I scolded him to it a dozen times a day.

  Gatty half turned her head as the wooden shutter rapped at the casement, but she didn’t move, save to wriggle herself a little closer to the fire. When I’d returned from saying the Nones prayers at St Olaf’s chapel, she was dashing about the cottage as if she was possessed of a demon, leaping on and off the table, racing about the room. Cats are always agitated when they sense a wind is coming. But when it arrives they settle themselves down somewhere warm and sheltered, as if their work is done.

  A cry outside made us both turn our heads. Had I caught the thief at last?

  I lit the lantern that hung ready, and slid my longest, sharpest knife into my belt. I tried to ease the door open quietly, but it was snatched from my grasp and slammed against the wall. The wind shrieked through the cottage, lifting the bracken on the floor and sending the flames in the hearth guttering. The smoke whirled out in choking clouds. Gatty scrambled up the ladder into the half-loft to hide. I was compelled to set the lantern down and use both hands to pull the door closed behind me. It was as black as the devil’s soul outside.

  Holding my skirts tightly against the wind, I edged towards the pigsty and raised the lantern. The sow had ushered her remaining six piglets into the round stone shelter. She lay with her back to the hole to shelter them. She’d farrowed eleven, but crushed two and three had vanished in the night. ‘Foxes,’ my neighbours said, ‘or wolves.’ One even told me it was a bear, for he swore he’d seen tracks in the forest. But I knew exactly what manner of beast had taken my piglets. I’d set iron caltrops around the sty, burying the spikes beneath a thin layer of leaf mould. But I had not set them to catch any animal.

  When a storm is coming, pigs run about with straw hanging from their jaws. Like cats, they sense its approach. Not many cottagers in Porlock Weir kept pigs. If they were fishermen or sailors, they wouldn’t even utter the name. The things, they called them, or else grunters, and if a pig crossed their path on their way to the boats, they’d turn tail for home. They’d rather let their children go hungry than put to sea. They were quick enough to read omens in the dumb beasts, but spat in the face of our Lord, even when He turned the golden sun black in the sky above them. It was the villagers I called grunters.

  I swept the feeble beam from the lantern over the places where I’d buried the caltrops. I’d caught him at last! There he was, rolling helplessly on the ground, his foot impaled by a spike. But I felt a pang of disappointment as I moved closer and saw it was nothing but an empty sack that had snagged on a bush and was flapping in the wind. It was probably the sack the thief had brought with him to steal yet another of my piglets.

  Suppose he’d snatched one already, but dropped the sack and piglet when he heard me coming. It might be running loose close by. I cast my lantern about again, poking under bushes and listening for the piglet’s squeals. But a herd of wild boar might have been running through my herb garden and I wouldn’t have heard them over that wind.

  A violent gust almost sent me stumbling on to one of my own caltrops. If I continued blundering about in that storm I’d likely break a leg and my idle neighbours wouldn’t trouble to answer my cries. Best to wait till morning light then search again. I consoled myself with the thought that if the piglet was hiding close by, it would return to the sound of its dam’s grunts when she stirred at daybreak.

  I fought my way back towards the cottage door. The sea thundered against the cliffs, roaring as if it was determined to out-shout the wind. The glimmer of lights from the lanterns set in the casements of the cottages caught the white tops of the waves, which were already crashing over the track that ran along the shore. More pinpricks of yellow light were swaying up the hill. Some of the villagers who lived closest to the beach must be moving their families to higher ground.

  The wind knocked me hard against the stone wall of my cottage. I groped along it, setting my lantern down to try to stop the door being snatched from its hinges as I opened it. As I turned to retrieve the lantern, my attention was caught by something bright gleaming far out in the raging sea. I blinked furiously as the salt-wind blurred my eyes with tears. Three tiny lights rose up out of the darkness, only to vanish again. I knew them at once for the lights of a ship, and one that was perilously close to the cliffs. Again they rose, like fish leaping to escape the maw of a whale, only to vanish once more. The lights reappeared, but there were only two this time and set at such an angle I knew the ship must have struck the rocks.

  I muttered a fervent prayer to the Blessed Virgin and to all the saints for those poor souls on board th
at stricken vessel. God grant them a miracle. Bring them safe ashore! But even as I watched, the ship’s lantern lights were swallowed by the waves, and they did not rise again.

  Chapter 5

  Will

  Riddle me this: What is the distance from the surface of the sea to its deepest part?

  The old besom nearly caught me. It was that evil cat of hers, more savage than any watchdog. I could almost believe what some of the village women mutter about that imp being her familiar. I swear it whispered in her ear and told her when I was creeping around her cottage. How else would she have heard me above the wind?

  I never thought she’d go so far as to lay caltrops, though. Where had the Holy Hag got hold of those? I’d come within a mouse’s whisker of standing on one the first time she hid them beneath the leaf litter, but my bandy legs saved me from being impaled. Longshanks put their feet straight down, I rock from side to side, which, I can assure you, is agony on the hips and knees. But for once I was grateful for, as my foot lifted sideways, the edge of my shoe knocked against one of the spikes, sending the caltrop rolling. After that I took care always to take a stick to prod the ground whenever I went there to purloin another piglet.

  I know what you’re thinking – what kind of man steals food from an elderly woman? But how much meat can one old besom eat all by herself? I couldn’t claim to be starving. Fish I could catch a-plenty, gather seaweed too, even limpets and razor shells. But meat and bread, pies and puddings were what I was used to in my lord’s employ, and fish alone just doesn’t satisfy the belly, not when you eat nothing else morning, noon and night. I salivated for meat. I dreamed of meat. I craved it.

  In the beginning I offered Matilda several fishes for just a small piece of pork. But she picked up her broom and shoved me away from her threshold, as if I was a flea-bitten dog begging for scraps. ‘Get away, you filthy little creature.’

  Well, you can’t say I hadn’t offered to trade fairly, and you know us stray dogs: we’ll snatch any food left unattended. We are just dumb creatures, after all.

  But she’d almost caught me this time. I hadn’t heard the door open over the wind, and only just reached the back of her house before the light from the lantern caught me. I hadn’t managed to fasten the neck of the sack and, as I dived for cover, the wretched piglet wriggled free and ran off into the darkness, while the wind snatched away the sack. I didn’t dare move until I saw the lantern light disappear as she shuffled around the house. But I couldn’t risk trying again. She was probably lying in wait just round the corner. I’d be back, though. She needn’t think she’d won.

  One of the advantages of being a dwarf, real or fake, is that you’re already low to the ground so I didn’t need to duck as I scuttled along the back of her cottage and away down the track. A light burst in the dark sky above me, startling me so much that I tripped and only my stick saved me from falling on my face. The beacon on the watchtower had been set ablaze. Flames were leaping into the night, whipped up like demons in the wind. I heard shouts and glimpsed lanterns bobbing up and down as men hurried towards the shore. Maybe a ship or boat was foundering.

  I scuttled down the hill. Waves were surging over the path that ran above the beach, the dark water swirling about the lowest cottages. The red glow of the beacon flames revealed a jagged gap in the row of houses below. One of the wooden smoke huts had already been smashed and swept away. Others in that row would surely follow before the night was out. If there was a ship out there in that storm, there was little hope of any man being saved from it. Anything – or anyone – that fell into those waves would be swept out to sea or, if they were carried towards the beach, dashed to pieces against the stone banks of the fish weirs or smashed against a cottage wall.

  I joined the other men standing on the slope looking down at the shore below. The lanterns did little more than illuminate the troubled faces of their owners. I stared out over the black water of the bay. Even at that distance, salt spray and skeins of white foam were caught up by the wind and flung into our stinging eyes, drenching our faces. But though I strained to peer into the darkness, I could glimpse no ship out there. It must either have broken its back on the rocks and sunk or had rounded the headland if, by some miracle, it had survived.

  ‘Hey, what’s that?’ a man shouted. He was crouching down, holding his lantern as low as he could, but the light was too feeble to illuminate anything except the grass and wind-whipped bushes. We edged further down the slope.

  ‘Someone’s there,’ Daveth shouted. ‘See, in the water, ’tween the cottages.’

  ‘Just a bit of sailcloth being tossed about,’ another bellowed back, over the roar of the wind.

  ‘Looks human to me.’

  ‘If it is, it’ll be a corpse. No sense in risking a living man just to pull out a dead ’un.’

  ‘Head’s sticking up – that’s no corpse,’ Daveth shouted. ‘But if we don’t get him out of there he soon will be. He’ll not be able to hold on long in that swell. He’ll be dragged back out.’

  The men crowded together, all trying to peer down into the gap between the cottages below. I was squashed between them, a mass of stinking breeches pressing into my face, but I was used to that. At least the longshanks had their uses: they kept off the worst of the wind.

  Daveth gazed round at the knot of men and suddenly noticed me, wedged up against his crotch. ‘Use the little man. Tie a rope round him and drop him down there to take a squint.’

  The men held up their lanterns and studied me, as if I was a strange fish they’d just dragged up in their nets. I thought they were going to hitch a rope around me and toss me into the water without so much as a by-your-leave.

  But at least the packhorse man, Elis, had the courtesy to ask, ‘You willing? You being so light, we can lower you down quicker than any of us.’

  I didn’t doubt that, though I wasn’t at all sure they’d bother to haul me back up. But if there was some poor bastard clinging on in that sea, they’d be growing colder and weaker with every wave that crashed over them. Besides, if I refused, the villagers would probably throw me down anyway. I nodded and tried to assure myself that at least fishermen and packmen between them could be trusted to tie a secure knot.

  The wind hit me the moment I began to descend, knocking me from my feet. I slid down the slope of the rise, bumping over every stone and scraping against every thorny shrub on the way. Waves were surging in on both sides of the cottages, splashing against the walls and bank, so that before I’d even reached the bottom of the slope I was dripping from the spray. I was forced to grab a particularly prickly bush to stop myself slipping straight into the water, and tried to rub the salt water from my stinging eyes with my sodden sleeve.

  The light from the lanterns the men were dangling above me grazed the black water, giving it an oily sheen, but it was impossible to judge just how deep it was. I cursed myself with every name of fool. Light I might be, but down there what was needed was a giant, not a dwarf, to wade through the surge. The rope was slack. I edged down. My foot slipped and I plunged straight into the freezing water, just as another wave crashed over. Choking and gagging, I was so panic-stricken I didn’t even realise the men above had tightened the rope and were hauling me out, like a mackerel on a line.

  As I rose, I glimpsed something white beneath me. The poor wretch was tangled in the struts of a fish-drying rack. The face vanished as another wave surged over it. Long dark hair streamed out as the wave dragged the head back, and the face floated to the surface again. In the flickering red glow from the beacon it was hard to distinguish any features, but I was sure of two things: it was a woman, not a man, who floated down there, and whoever she was, she was dead.

  What I should have done then was to tug on the rope and signal for them to haul me up. What was the sense in risking my life to drag up a corpse, when in all likelihood the fishermen would simply hurl her back into the sea? They always said a corpse that the sea had claimed for her own should never be stolen from her.
But dwarfs, even unnatural ones like me, are contrary creatures, perverse. And, after all, as my erstwhile master would be only too willing to testify, I am a thief.

  With one huge effort I flung myself forward, lunging towards the woman and grabbing her by the hair, just as another wave broke over us both. I clung to her as the wave sucked back with such power I was sure it would drag me off the rope. If I’d had even a grain of hope that the woman was alive, one touch of her fish-cold skin banished it. But somehow that made me more determined the sea would not keep her.

  My legs may be as bowed as a tar barrel, though my arms are strong, thanks to years of having to haul myself up on to benches and beds made for longshanks. But my hands were growing numb in the icy water, and the waves crashed over me several times before I managed to get the rope looped over both of us.

  The men above were yelling down, but their words might as well have been the screech of gulls for all the sense I could make of what they were saying above the roar of wind and waves. I could scarcely move my fingers for the cold, but I tore with my teeth until her gown suddenly ripped free from the rack, and for a terrifying moment we were both floating free in the water. She lay like a lover in my embrace, her head flopped on to my shoulder, the wet strands of her hair tangled about my neck.

  I tugged sharply on the rope, and felt an answering jerk as it tightened, dragging us from the sucking water. My crooked back smashed against the slope. Then came the slow, painful ascent, as we were jerked and hauled over grass and through bushes, inch by inch up the rise, with the rope cutting and burning into my flesh. The woman’s head hung against my shoulder, her body limp in my arms as if I was carrying a sleeping lover to my bed. For all the pain it was causing me, I wanted that slope to grow even higher, so that I could hold her just a few minutes more. But Mistress Time was playing her usual tricks and would not spread herself for me.