The Wicked and the Just (19 page)

Nicholas blinks and rubs his eyes. “I'm sure there's naught wrong with your foolish gowns.”

“She tore them all!” I lash a finger at Gwinny as if dealing the mark of Cain. “Every last thing I own is in ribbons!”

Gwinny says naught. Her eyes are red, as if it is she who's been wronged and betrayed.

Nicholas frowns and stretches. “This is something your father should—”

“My father isn't here!” I glare at him with all my hating. “Are you not a man? Punish her!”

“Wait here,” Nicholas says grimly, and he goes abovestairs. When he returns, his face is terrible. He towers over Gwinny and demands, “What would make you do such a thing?”

Gwinny looks at me long and level, then turns her eyes to the floor.

“
Cart. Whipped.
” I snap each word as I cannot Gwinny's neck. “She has devils in her.”

Nicholas's face is black as sin. He takes Gwinny by the elbow and roughly tows her out the rearyard door.

 

 

K
NOW
what's coming. Not afraid. Keep my eyes down, though. No need to make it worse.

The cold is blistering. Fingers stiffen in instants. Wind makes a mask of my face.

Oh, Christ. Gruffydd is by the shed, something on his shoulder. Catch his eye and shake my head. He must not step into this. The brat cannot know this matters to him.

Put both hands on the kitchen wall. Not afraid.

Brace.

A stripe of fire across my back. Curl my fingers against the wattles. Dig nails in.

A second blow over the first and I cry out. A third. Salted daggers carve from shoulder to backside, curling beneath my arms, nipping ribs. Christ help me, I'm dying on my knees in the snow while leather sings and my back opens and my throat goes raw and little ones look after littler ones no matter what the cost.

 

 

I
T'S OVER
ere I know it. Gwinny is sobbing in a heap in the snow. Mistress Tipley flies out of the kitchen, her sleeves still rolled to the elbow, and she falls to her knees at Gwinny's side.

“Happy?” Nicholas asks me curtly. He turns on his heel and strides into the house.

Griffith stands in the shed's doorway, gripping the frame as if it's the neck of something deadly. He starts toward Gwinny, then hesitates, cuts his eyes to me.

I will not be trifled with. That's the lesson he must study over all the rest.

I follow Nicholas into the house, but I don't stop in the hall. I don't even acknowledge his shaky voice offering me a drink of undiluted wine. I stomp abovestairs, grinding my toes against every step.

There are rags all over my chamber. Rags, where once I had gowns.

I kneel, collect a few scraps of rose wool. These stitches were strong, too. Tiny and doubled-up. Some of my best work, and like as not Gwinny's too. Now the edges are frayed and tangled. They'll not even be stitched back together in this state.

I close my eyes.

Later today I will show this mess to my father and he will shrug unhelpfully and give me the usual nonsense about how every penny he has will go to keeping us in bread this winter and there's no coin to spare for frivolities—that's how he'll put it,
frivolities,
as if my whole
life
isn't in tatters—and what's wrong with the gown I'm wearing, anyway?

Later today I'll have to go to the Coucy house. The lady de Coucy will eye my ragged cuffs and explain to me for the better part of an afternoon why ragged cuffs will mark me a
novi
and no good lady of Caernarvon should be seen outside wearing clothing in ill repair and I'd know that if I paid half a mind to her but apparently I'm too ignorant to even listen properly.

I gave Gwinny a gown. We saw justice done to a filthy swine of a levelooker who abused his position of power in the borough. She even helped me fend off the unwanted advances of a known scoundrel who sought to take advantage of my youth and gentle nature.

And this—this!—is how I'm repaid.

Gwinny will curse the hour she wronged Cecily d'Edgeley.

I don't give Mistress Tipley the chance to give her a soft task, tucked away in some warm corner of the kitchen. I call Gwinny abovestairs to clean this mess.

It seems forever ere there's a dragging on the stairs, then Gwinny appears at the curtain. She's the color of new cheese and she moves like a stiff puppet on strings.

“Pick it up.” I kick a crumpled sleeve at her. “Pick it all up, damn you. Every last scrap.”

Gwinny does not bend over to retrieve the wool. Instead she crouches and feels about till she gets it in hand. Then she rises like a water bird, her teeth gritted and her breath in gasps.

“All I had.” I swallow and swallow but my voice is still warpy. “All I had that was mine. And only mine. And now I have naught. Because of you.”

Gwinny leans heavily against the wall and falters, then she makes a garbled sound and collapses to the floor.

I jab her shoulder with my toe. “Get up, you lazy thing, else I'll give you such a cartwhipping that your grandchildren will feel it. You're fooling no one with this display of—”

“Merciful God Almighty!” Mistress Tipley crosses the room in three big strides and shoves me away from Gwinny.

I hit the wall hard, then rock away sputtering, “How dare you?”

The old cow glares up at me like a serpent from Gwinny's side. “How dare
you,
you wicked girl? Now help me get her on the bed.”

“
My
bed? I don't think so.”

“Fine, is it?” Mistress Tipley mutters to Gwinny as she tugs and wriggles Gwinny's gown over her head. “You most certainly are
not
.”

Gwinny makes no sound as Mistress Tipley pulls off her garments. She lies on her side facing the wall. Her hair spills like a matted hide around bony gray shoulders.

“Come here, girl,” Mistress Tipley snarls at me, “and see what you wrought.”

I don't have to come. I can see from here.

Gwinny's back is covered with a grid of cuts. Most are a fingernail's depth with edges that curl apart like long, gaping mouths. Where the worst cuts cross, the skin is peeling away in a limp triangle. Her whole back is a deep, angry red, smeary with blood and striped across with angry purple jags.

“No,” I finally whisper. “I—I didn't do this.”

“You most certainly did. Now help me get her into bed.”

I hesitate. And hesitate. Then I pick up Gwinny's feet. They're freezing cold and rough like stones. Mistress Tipley gingerly hoists Gwinny beneath the armpits and we shudder her onto my bed, where she lies like a wet sack.

On my clean linen.

Gwinny moans something in Welsh. Mistress Tipley pets her ragged hair and dabs a rag wetted in my washwater against the cuts on her back. Blood fills the cleaves and stripes down her back, staining the linen.

I did not do this.

Gwinny would be fine had she not wantonly destroyed my property.

I stomp belowstairs and into the hall, and my father bids me a spry good morrow when I take my place at table before a trencher of maslin. Henry grunts a greeting through a mouthful of food, but Nicholas is nowhere in sight.

My father prattles about his foolish office between bites, how the millers are desperate cheats who'll do anything to avoid borough court and how Welshmen do any number of clever things to hide their handmills when they hear he's nearby, which just shows how well he's extending borough justice to the Welshry.

My father must not know yet.

I eat quickly, then excuse myself. He'll find out soon enough, and my father in a temper is pure wrothfulness, not justice.

I go to the workroom and sit before my embroidery frame. I pin and repin the length of linen my father gave me, then I unwrap my skeins of Christmas floss and try to imagine where to begin, what image to make.

It's no use. I give up on the linen and retrieve my spindle from beneath a wadded cloak in need of mending.

I tease out some wool, let the whorl drop. The fibers twist on themselves, and in a while I have a strand of yarn the length of my hand.

In the time it took me to make this strand, Gwinny tore apart every gown I owned.

I throw the wool and spindle across the room with a howl and hate Gwinny and her whole family and weep and hurl the half-mended cloak at the wall for good measure.

Someone will hear me and come. My father, or mayhap one of my lackwit cousins. They'll come to the workroom door with brows furrowed and ask what the matter is, and I'll weep and mourn my loss and they'll see justice done.

The moments stretch like year-old honey. Laughter from the hall, the clatter of crockery. No one comes.

 

My father does not throw Gwinny into the gutter when he learns what she has wrought. He does not even devolve into ranting. Because while I'm sulking in the workroom, Mistress Tipley plies him with claret and spins a fairy story about spats between girls, how easy it would be to overreact to something this silly, how things like gowns can be repaired, how he has a reputation in the borough to consider.

So he merely whistles low when I shake handfuls of rags in his face, and he jokes that he ought to hire Gwinny as one of his mill enforcers. He laughs aloud when I demand that he take Gwinny to Court Baron for recompense for my wardrobe, and he chides Nicholas for whipping a maidservant so hard. When I'm ready to boil over, my father gives that rotten Gwinny a clean-struck penny for her troubles. The hospitality of his hearth, he says, is hers till she recovers fully.

In the same breath, my father tells me I'm stuck with my one remaining gown unless I grow two handswidths during the winter, and even then he might just bid Mistress Tipley give me something of hers. Then he tells me to stop my caterwauling and mend my underclothes because no one has any business putting eyes on them anyway.

I'm in my workroom now. I cannot wait till tomorrow, when Griffith will be here to mend the byre fence and study his lessons.

 

 

 

 

I
T'S CHRISTMAS
. The holly and ivy are up. There's strong cider waiting when we get back from Mass and the Yule log stretches all the way across the hall, so we must step over it. I can close my eyes and everything is as it should be, all the mingled smells of roast goose and woodsmoke and bitter evergreen, the wind twittering, the crunch of feet in snow, the crackle of fire.

Then I open my eyes.

Nothing is right.

The goose is roasting, but it is Mistress Tipley's hand on the spit. Not my mother's.

Nicholas and Henry are cheerfully drunk on Rhenish and aqua vitae. They are planning to go out mumming later, which will inevitably devolve into misrule. They might even remember to wave to me through the window when they go, and they will come back pink and laughing and full of furtive looks and guffaws and secret jokes that they will tell me are not fit for my ears.

The holly and ivy are up, as crooked as only drink-addled male hands can make them. My mother would have straightened the greens, primped them, and tied tiny ribbons to the ends.