The Wicked and the Just (25 page)

Then I will have naught left to lose.

 

 

 

 

E
MMALINE'S
father is accused of murder.

I'm not supposed to know a word of it, of course, but it's impossible to get a moment of marketing done without absorbing who's with child by whom or who's fighting with her mother-in-law or whose baby has rump rash bad enough to blister.

As near as I can figure out, Sir John de Coucy was out on his endowed cropland and caught a Welshman foraging in the stubble. Apparently there was a struggle and Sir John slew the Welshman with his falchion.

My father keeps combing a hand through his hair and muttering that it could have been him, it could have been him.

Murder is the Crown's jurisdiction, not the borough's, and the royal justice itinerant will be coming from Conwy to hear the case.

The Coucys' mousy servant appears on our doorstep with the message that the lady de Coucy will not expect me this Monday, nor on any Monday until further notice. My father says that no man can blame her, even though the look about him suggests that he's a man who could. I merely glance up from my embroidery frame with my good-girl smile
that says whatever the lady de Coucy thinks is best
and all that rot.

And I spend Monday peaceably for a change, outlining the city walls of Caernarvon with a strand of purple-gray thread that seems made for the purpose.

 

It's high summer, and that means there isn't much hired work to do around the townhouse. I explain to my father that Gwinny is worried about her brother, who's finding it hard to get a job of work, and I ask if there's something that needs doing at one of the mills.

My father has some sort of merry wine-tinted exchange at the Boar's Head with the provisioner of the castle garrison and learns that one of the timber gangs is a man short. If Griffith wants the work, he's to report to a man with the rather unsavory name of Snagnose John at the Newdale site on the morrow at dawn.

One of the Glover lads is dispatched to inform Griffith of the offer, and I dance toward the kitchen to tell Gwinny what I've done, but I pull up short the instant I step into the rearyard.

She'll think it's a trick. And she'll tell him not to go.

I hesitate in the doorway for a long moment.

Then I take myself to my workroom and plant my backside before my frame.

I know he takes the work, though. I know because Gwinny comes in one day smiling in a way that makes her every step light as she sweeps and tidies.

Gwinny is rather pretty when she smiles. I wonder why I never noticed ere this.

 

Emmaline de Coucy turns up on my doorstep unbidden and unannounced. She's robed in servants' linsey and her eyes are red.

“Mother doesn't know I'm here,” she whispers. “Won't you please let me in ere someone sees me?”

I bite back the choice words I have for the lady de Coucy and show Emmaline into the hall. I pour her a mug of new cider and steer her to the hearthbench, away from Salvo's pallet.

“Forgive me breaking your peace.” Emmaline's voice quavers. “I couldn't bear to be alone. I'm so worried about my father. What if the royal justice finds against him? They hang felons! Just like those two poor Welshmen, God rest them!”

I pour myself some cider and take a long drink. It could very well have been my father who drew steel on a trespasser, and me weeping secretly at Emmaline's hearth.

If the lady de Coucy allowed it.

“Do you think the king would truly hang your father?” I make my tone reasonable. “Sir John de Coucy? Burgess and
honesti
of Caernarvon?”

“Yes! His Grace the king is adamant that this province be governed by statute and his law applied evenhandedly regardless of blood.” Emmaline wipes her eyes. “If the mayor himself were found guilty, he would be hanged.”

“His Grace the king is rather generous.” I reply. “Mayhap he has never been here and met the Welsh.”

Emmaline chokes on a giggle. “The king knows the Welsh very well. He would have them as subjects, so he must trust his officials here to govern as he bids. And he must trust us to treat the Welsh as neighbors.”

“Neighbors,” I echo. Neighbors who pay all the taxes. Neighbors who rob one another at the market out of hunger. Neighbors who cannot get a decent job of work without the intervention of a burgess.

“Oh, Cecily, my father had no murder in his heart!” Emmaline toys with a loosening stitch of her handkerchief. “It was all misadventure, but out there in county court there will be Welshmen on the jury. They'll want vengeance, not justice.”

Out there. Without the walls. I pat her shoulder as she sniffles into her handkerchief. “All will be well. Truly. His Grace the king would not suffer a man to be punished wrongfully. Especially a man like your father. There will be justice. You must believe that.”

Emmaline worries the stitching on her handkerchief. She doesn't believe it. The king might want Caernarvon ruled by statute, but it's hard to insist on it when he's so far away.

***

It's not even Tierce and it's sweltering. The market is dusty and the basket is heavy and I'm thirstier than a year's worth of Augusts. Mistress Tipley bustles ahead. I sway behind her, heaving the basket because this task is rightfully mine.

At the bakery, Mistress Tipley hands over the five wads of bread dough. The baker pulls out five loaves and pushes them across the counter.

“Are you not supposed to keep one?” I ask him. “To feed the castle garrison?”

The baker shakes his head. “Don't need it now. The garrison is being thinned since the order to muster came down.”

“What order?”

“Every man of military age in the Principality is summoned to fight for his Grace the king in Gascony and—Demoiselle, what ails you?”

No.

Not him, too.

I tear out of the bakery, leaving Mistress Tipley and the market basket behind. Past shoulders and around carts and over puddles and he's a trial and a goose but the king cannot make him go to Gascony, he just cannot!

I burst in, slam the door, stumble down the corridor. My father is in the hall buckling on his wrist braces. I fling myself at him and hold on hard.

“Don't go! You cannot go!”

My father peels me off gently and steers me toward a bench. “What's all this, sweeting? Where can I not go?” He sits on the other bench, forearms on knees, all wrinkled brow and downturned mustache and gray at his temples.

“Gascony! The baker said that all the men here must fight for the king in Gascony!”

“Sweeting, that summons isn't for the burgesses. His Grace is summoning the Welshmen of the Principality to his standard. They're the ones who must fight abroad.”

I lift my head, scrub my eyes. “The Welshmen? Not you?”

“No, sweeting. I owe for my burgage twelvepence a year. I owe no military service abroad. I owe no service in England, either. All I must do is defend the king's interests in the Principality. Remember?”

My father is not going to Gascony.

I let out a long, shuddering breath.

“Now, your uncle Roger,” my father says with a smile, “is responsible for equipping two and a third serjeants for service in Gascony, if he does not go himself.”

I giggle. Two and a third serjeants. I wonder what good a third of a serjeant would be to the king.

My uncle Roger owes service for Edgeley. He must pay taxes like lastage and passage and a fifteenth of his movable goods when the king requests it. He must trade on market day.

We don't have any such restrictions. Here in Caernarvon, we're friends of the king.

“That's my girl.” My father embraces me and rises. “I'm off. The mayor is expecting a report on the state of the mills. Have you seen my counter-roll of fines?”

“In the coffer. Where it always is.”

“Good girl.”

And he's out the door with a tromp of boots and a whuffle of wood.

Thank Christ. Thank Christ and all the saints for our friendship with the king.

Gwinny stands before the hearth, clinging to the broom. She looks like a corpse, bloodless and stiff.

“Oh, Gwinny, your brother!” I press a hand to my mouth. “Your brother will have to go.”

She sinks to the floor and runs both hands over her hair. The broom clatters behind her. She looks greensick.

“He's all I've got,” she whispers.

Gwinny looks so small crumpled like a dishrag in the hearth corner that I sift for something to say that will make her feel better.

Someone else might try, “Mayhap it'll be a good thing. His Grace the king pays wages, you know.” Or, “Griffith will be fine. He'll come back with a purse full of silver and tales of heroics in Gascony. And September is a long time from now.”

But I keep my mouth shut.

Because if anyone had said those things to me an Ave ago, I might have clawed her eyes out.

 

 

T
AKING
. They're always taking. Da. Pencoed. Coin. Beasts.

Now they want my brother.

Hands out, rattle parchment, cry it down in grating, rusty English.

Those who do not give freely lose all.

Know not where I first hear the name. It rises from the dusty ground, from the powdered ash of charcoal bones that once were live and lowing and keeping us from hunger.

Madog.

It's breathed like prayer from the very soul of the Welshry, wreathed round the horns of distrained cattle peaceably browsing Watched burgess land. It's in the Crown measures, the market pennies, the chalk.

Madog ap Llywelyn ap Maredydd ap Llywelyn ap Maredydd ap Cynan ab Owain Gwynedd. Disinherited son of a slighted line, trembling with quiet rage in some forgotten corner of this land.

Know not if he's even real, and if he is, know not what to make of the mutters men pair with his name.

They are the mutters of sharpened staves. Of spears hidden in the rafters. Murdered fathers and seized estates.
Contra pacem,
they said. Da had taken up arms against the king,
their
king, a man he never swore for, so they took all.

Madog. Breathe it like prayer. Madog ap Llywelyn ap Maredydd ap Llywelyn ap Maredydd ap Cynan ab Owain Gwynedd.

Please God let him be real. We are all becoming men with blackened faces, even with the gallows in plain view.

 

 

P
OTTAGE AGAIN
. Miserable, misbegotten refuse better suited for filling gaps in the wall slats.

I cheerily serve a plate of it to my father. “Look at the delicious pottage, Papa. How much I love eating it day after day. So delightful that we may eat it for breakfast and dinner, too. And such flavor! Not at all like the mud pasties that the Glover children serve one another.”

“Sit down and eat it,” my father growls. “Not even the mayor has a haunch of meat.”

I do, but now I'm thinking of wall plaster and every bite goes down that much harder for it.