The Wicked and the Just (22 page)

 

 

M
AKE
no haste. Couldn't if I wanted to, but I don't. What awaits me at the steading will be the same regardless of haste.

It'll be bad. Scavengers will have been at the corpse.

She'll have died alone, weeping for her babies.

That is what the brat will pay for. Whatever the cost.

Uphill takes months and years. Must move in tiny margins. Mustn't bend. Scabs are still raw enough to tear.

Cannot smell the corpse yet. Mayhap the cold holds it down.

Limp inside and blink. There's fire.

Go cold all over because fire means Gruffydd has foregone labor to tend Mam and it'll be se'ennights ere he sees even half a chance at a penny again.

But it's not Gruffydd who rises from the shadows. It's Fanwra from down the vale, and she gestures shyly to Mam.

“She's a tough old girl,” Fanwra says in her wispy little voice that makes me think of baby birds and dry grass.

“You're kind to come.”

Fanwra worries her ratty sleeves. “Gruffydd asked me to stay with her. There's not much I'd deny him.”

Her words hang there, waiting for me to dignify them, to bless her devotion. Not in this lifetime, though, nor in any spare moment of the hereafter.

“You're kind to come.”

Fanwra finally flutters toward the door, muttering well-wishes and prayers for Mam. The moment she's gone, I sink in fits and measures to my knees while keeping my mincemeat back in a rigid column.

Mam whimpers for water. The leather bucket is empty. Look at it and look at it, as if one wrung-out plea will make it fill itself. Then rise, every margin a blade of fire, and edge downhill toward the creek with the bucket swaying from my hand like a hanged man.

 

They come at night. Gruffydd goes with them. He darkens his face with ashes and pulls Da's spear from the rafters without flinch or hesitation, as if he'd known where it was all along. His eyes scream like jewels from the soot.

The others say little. They stand without the door, flat against the steading. A mass of shadows, men and weapons, curves and angles and blades.

Don't see them. Don't know them. Cannot betray them.

Da went out. Da never came back. They left his body on the walls till naught but scraps were left.

Gruffydd wears no cloak. Cloaks catch and snag on brush. He shivers already.

My little brother. The boy who once wept for injured hares and maidens ill-served in nursery tales. Now there's down on his cheeks. Scars across both hands.

Da went out, called up by his prince. Da stood with the prince when he fell at Cefn-y-bedd, and all Wales with them. He stood after, while men submitted in droves to save themselves, their lands. He stood against their king till English hanged him from the walls of Caernarvon.

They come at night and Gruffydd follows, disappears into darkness.

 

 

A
SE'ENNIGHT
after Candlemas, we always feed the poor in honor of my mother.

At Edgeley, tenants filled the great trestle tables in the hall and spilled out into the yard. Every man, woman, and child in the village left full to bursting. Meat and ale, bread and cheese. Wine for the reeve. Cakes for the children. Whatever was left we sent home with each family, wrapped up in linsey.

When we return from Candlemas Mass, I ask my father how we'll feed the poor this year when our house is so small.

“Oh, sweeting, it'll be hard enough to keep our bodies and souls together till spring.” He runs a hand through his hair. “And it isn't as if this is Edgeley, where the tenants would be at the door with pitchforks should I think to go against custom.”

I frown. “You mean we aren't going to feed the poor this year?”

“I'll pray for them, sweeting. These people aren't my tenants. There's no custom binding me to them.”

The custom doesn't bind us to the tenants. It binds us to her.

But he's got that don't-make-me-cuff-you look about him, so I duck my head like a good girl and say naught. Instead I wait for him to put on his boots and pick up his questioning cudgel and go out to officer the mills. I hide behind the garden shed until Mistress Tipley lumbers into the yard privy, then I dart into the kitchen and liberate three big loaves from the trestle. I put on my cloak and find Gwinny plaiting hemp in the hearth corner.

“Can you walk? I'm going without the walls and I'd have you with me.”

“What for?”

“I'm feeding the poor.”

Gwinny's eyes jerk up as though I've crowned myself dunghill princess. “You are not.”

My mother had hair the color of a new-brushed roan. She was always moving, never still, and she walked chin up with a jingle of keys, with Salvo ever her shadow.

I hold up the bread.

Gwinny lays aside her task and rises in stiff margins. “If you say it's so, it must be so.”

“Does that mean you're coming?”

Gwinny smiles in a way I'm not sure I like. “Wouldn't miss it.”

It's rising Tierce. Midmorning is achingly cold and the color of wallstone. The bread in the satchel against my back is no longer warm and grows heavier by the moment. The serjeant at the trestle marks Gwinny at my elbow, but I meet his eyes steadily until he steps aside and lets us through.

Outside the gate, I drift a few paces, then stop ere I even get across the quay bridge. I didn't think this through very well. I haven't the first idea where to even look for the poor.

“You still want to feed the poor?” Gwinny stares into the distance, her hair snarling into her eyes. I nod and she says, “Come.”

She leads me toward the market common. Along the trodden toll path, huddled like piles of wet laundry awaiting the clothesline, are whole families with cheeks like slack sails, and graybeards with fingers all knuckle. Dozens of men, women, and children, and I have but three loaves.

“The poor,” Gwinny says expansively, gesturing. She's appraising me sidelong, not quite smiling.

She's waiting for me to run away screaming.

The poor are ashen and malodorous. They're not like the poor of Edgeley. Those were people I knew. Every one of them. Down to their livestock. They were a part of Edgeley and therefore mine. But these poor wretches are living skeletons, something straight out of a sermon on sin. If I stay too long in their company, I'll end up one of them.

But I'll not give Gwinny the satisfaction of leaving. Besides, I'm not here for her.

I slide my satchel off my shoulder and fumble with the bread. Nearby is a gaunt mother of two tiny redheads who are covered in rashy scabs. I tear off a chunk of bread and hand it to her.

She gapes and stammers something to me in a voice that sways like a bird on the wing, then breaks the bread in two and hands one piece to each child. She closes her eyes as they gulp it down.

Some of the poor, the stronger ones, rise and lurch toward us, and Gwinny says something to them in Welsh in a sharp, no-nonsense voice. They stop and retrace their steps, some mutinous, some hopeful.

“I told them to make a queue,” Gwinny says to me, “and that you'd go along and give everyone something.”

So I do. I break off pieces as equally as I can, placing bread in every palm that's put toward me. They eat as if they've never seen bread ere this. As if they'll never see it again.

When the bread is gone and my satchel twice tipped for every last crumb, I smile and shrug and look to Gwinny to say something to them. She does, and when she's finished, I gesture to the city gate and she falls into step at my elbow.

I cannot recall ever running out of food when we fed the poor at Edgeley.

“This isn't even the worst of it,” Gwinny says quietly. “These are the ones with strength enough to crawl to the common to beg.”

My mother was always moving, never idle, and had she been starving on the roadside with me beneath her arm, she would have gone without so I could feel full just for a moment. She would have wept to see me hungry, to have no way to feed me.

“Why?” Gwinny asks, so quiet the wind nearly takes it away.

“Why feed the poor?” I ask, and she nods. “Er, because they're hungry?”

Gwinny frowns as though she's heard me wrong. “Because they're hungry.”

I nod firmly, because I don't trust my voice to speak of my mother. Especially not today.

Back at the townhouse, my father is roaring at Mistress Tipley for taking the bread that was to last us the better part of a fortnight, and Mistress Tipley is cowering before the hearth and blubbering that she didn't take the bread and cannot imagine where it has gone.

As usual, it's up to me to make things right.

When my father pauses to take a breath, I clear my throat. “Papa, I know what became of the bread.”

All three turn toward me—my father in rage, Mistress Tipley in mute hope, and Gwinny in disbelief. But I'm no fool. I'll feed the poor, but I'll not take a thrashing for them.

I blame the one creature in the house guaranteed never to feel my father's temper.

“Please don't be wroth with him, Papa,” I say, “but I saw him coming out of the kitchen with the bread in his mouth, and when he saw me, he just gobbled it down ere I could get it away from him. I tied him up after that, but he must have eaten the other loaves ere I caught him. He's just so hungry, poor beast. Like the rest of us.”

My father's color is still high, but his fists are sliding to his sides and relaxing. He looses a long breath and mutters something to Mistress Tipley that might be an apology or permission to depart. Either way, she bobs her head and all but flies out of the hall.

I go to the rear storage chamber to fetch my father a mug of ale, but when I see the level in the barrel, bring him half a mug instead. My father sulks on one of the trestle benches and glares at Salvo, who lies against the warm hearthstones in dreamless sleep.

We eat naught for dinner, and for supper there is only watered maslin and some old squishy turnips that smell like unwashed hose.

I bite my tongue, though. If I'm hungry, someone else isn't, and I'm that much closer to her.

 

Rain and cold have killed the winter crop. Not just here, but on Anglesey, too. The barges have stopped poling in after Nones.

The prices at the market jump to twice and thrice the summer rates. On one Saturday alone, there are three knifepoint robberies and a whole rash of petty thefts.

Even though no victims were English and none of the assaults were carried out on market grounds, my father assigns one of his mill enforcers to escort Mistress Tipley and me when we market. He is called Geraint, and he has curls that beg to have hands run through them. He is the tallest of the mill enforcers by a head and muscled like a bulldog.

I must admit I like having Geraint along. Not only is he fair to look upon, the toll-table queue falls away like meat from a bone when we approach. So do the poor who still crowd the market path. The ones strong enough to crawl there.

I pray for them, then I thank God Almighty and my father and the millers of Caernarvon for the modest surplus in our rearyard shed.

 

Not long after Prime, Gwinny comes into the workroom, where I'm mending a massive tear in one of my father's tunics. “The lady de Coucy sent for you.”

I groan. “But it isn't Monday! Why in thimbles does she want to see me
now?
”

Gwinny shrugs, but I don't expect an answer from her. And the good Lord knows my father will raise Cain should I ignore a summons from the oh-so-important Coucys, so I put on my cloak and head up the road.

A mousy servant answers my knock and shows me to the solar. The lady de Coucy is spinning, so I discreetly clear my throat. She looks up and startles.

“Saints! Child, what are you doing here?”

I bite down on the smart-mouthed retort that will make its way back to my father and end in trouble I don't want. “You sent for me.”

The lady de Coucy slowly shakes her head as if I'm a babbling halfwit or speaking Welsh or both. “Why under Heaven would I send for you? Now be gone. I'm busy.”

“But . . . you . . .” I stifle a grin and nod politely and hustle out of the room ere she changes her mind. I'm so delighted that I've been spared an afternoon of harangue that I'm halfway up High Street ere I reckon why Gwinny would tell me the lady de Coucy wanted to see me when she obviously didn't.

When I get to the townhouse, Gwinny is shivering in the gutter out front. I approach her, but ere I can speak she says, “You're wanted at the Glover house. Mistress Glover hopes you'll mind the baby while she sleeps.”

“Mayhap in a moment,” I tell her, “because first I'll know why you . . . told me . . . What is that sound?”

Shuff-shuff. Shuff-shuff.

I crane my neck to peer down the greenway at the garden shed, but Gwinny puts herself firmly in my path.

“I must have been mistaken. Mistress Glover said to hurry.”