FAIR GAME
1632
The air inside the hollow tree was moist and cold, sharpened with the perfume of decay, but as I waited out of sight, I saw a wisp of smoke drifting from Maud’s chimney and I knew I still had time. I started to climb out, but something made me hesitate. There was a shift in the breeze, and with it the stink of burning pitch. My skin prickled. I looked over my shoulder and glimpsed a blur of movement in the bracken.
Excited voices burst out all around me and I could only watch, my eyes burning in the flare of torches, as a mob hurtled past me down the slope and plunged through Maud’s door. I heard the clatter of an overturned table and the crash of something hitting the wall. There were shouts and a window shutter flew open. I could see flames licking across the ceiling and sparks were spattering down. Soon the furniture would be on fire. But where was Maud?
And then I saw her, a hunched bundle of rags darting from the privy door; she hadn’t been in the cottage at all! I abandoned my hiding place, slithering down the slope and veering left towards the thicker line of trees where she seemed to be heading. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t go back home, my escape was bound to have been discovered, and they would guess my intent.
The cottage was burning, flames were flickering through the cracks in the shutters, and the mob was retreating, spilling into Maud’s little garden to admire the bonfire. A few of them, more interested in the hunt than the spectacle, drifted towards the wood.
I would have to be quick, but I was small for eleven and agile. I told myself I could elude them and find Maud. That was my only ambition. I didn’t want to go back, didn’t want to face the cleric. He would be angry this time; I had betrayed his trust.
He had come to the house that morning, a shadowy figure in a long black coat and a wide-brimmed hat that hid his eyes. I wouldn’t have let him in, Father was away and the housekeeper was still curled on her pallet in the loft, sleeping off the ale she had drunk the night before, but he had a parish constable with him and a gaggle of curious villagers. They were jostling for position, craning heads to see.
“Tell me about the wise woman, Maud,” the cleric said, smiling as I stepped back to allow him over the threshold.
The constable followed, shutting the door on the onlookers. He turned and leaned against it, tucking his thumbs into his belt. “You’re not in any trouble,” he said. “We just need your help.”
I glanced up the stairs, wondering whether to call the housekeeper, but I decided against it. She would only repeat everything to the gossip-mongers in the tavern. Better she slept.
“What do you want to know, sir?” Instinctively, I pulled down my sleeve, to hide the charm I was wearing around my wrist - a simple length of knotted crimson twine.
“You go to the wise woman’s cottage?” The cleric asked, though it was more a statement than a question, and I could hardly deny it anyway; I spent every spare moment with Maud. The housekeeper didn’t care where I was if I’d done my chores and I wasn’t under her feet, and Father wasn’t to know; he was always travelling.
“I help her.”
“How so?”
“In the garden, digging and planting.”
“She was your wet nurse wasn’t she, when your mother died?” The constable said.
I nodded.
“What else do you do for her?” The cleric asked.
I shrugged. “Forage.”
He looked more interested. I almost saw the gleam of his eye under the shadow of his hat brim. “In the woods?”
“Where else?”
“Roots and herbs?”
I nodded. “Doesn’t everyone? I know Lucy Addlecock picks honeysuckle for the pomanders she sells at market.”
He brushed my comment aside with an impatient sweep of his hand. “Mandrake… do you collect mandrake?”
“Yes.”
“And rue? What about belladonna, wormwood and mistletoe?”
“Yes all of it.”
“When the moon is full?”
“Sometimes.”
“So you go out at night?”
“Some of the herbs are shy of the sun.”
“Really?”
The constable gave a hiss of disapproval through his teeth, but the cleric just smiled.
“I suppose Maud has remedies for rheumatism, gout?”
“She’s a wise woman.” I sat down on the bottom stair, drawing my knees together and wrapping my skirts around my legs.
“Yes…yes, of course. And other ailments, troubles of a personal nature, does she give…advice?”
I knew what he meant – the troubled husbands. They never stayed long, staring at the floor, scuffing the dirt with their feet as they stuttered out some difficulty betwixt the sheets. Maud would always have a tonic ready, and she often told them to untie knotted cord or string that they might find in the house. They were too embarrassed to be grateful, but Maud never wanted for eggs or milk, or shoes or cloth which her neighbours would leave on her doorstep. The same neighbours that congregated outside now, pressing their faces at the windows.
The cleric took my silence to mean, ‘yes’.
“And charms, to ease a lovesick heart for example?” he asked.
“There’s no harm in that, is there?”
He smiled thinly. “Did she help with other difficulties?”
“What do you mean?” I hugged my knees.
“Sometimes someone might speak ill of another, cheat them, or hurt them in some way. Perhaps the aggrieved party came to Maud for help in squaring the account?”
Curses, he meant. “No.”
“Did she treat the Pickering baby?”
“The one that died last month?” It had suffered from some disease of the lungs. Maud had delivered it, but it was weak, had been born too soon, she said, and all she could do was ease its passage into the next world. It was a kindness of which the church and the law would not approve.
“I don’t know anything about it.”
“The parents found a charm under the baby’s bed. Blood and bones and such like.”
I looked at him aghast. Maud never dabbled in black magic; she was a healer.
“Maud wouldn’t… I know she just wouldn’t!”
“Then she’s nothing to fear,” he said too smoothly to be believed. He turned to the constable. “I’ve finished here.”
“Sorry, she’s wasted your time, pastor.”
“On the contrary.” Even with his eyes obscured, he looked smug. I’d thought I’d been careful, circumspect, but I must have let something slip, something to bring suspicion on Maud.
“Maud hasn’t done anything wrong, has she?”
“She will need to be examined,” he said coldly. “Be sure you stay here, girl…where it is safe.” He bent down to me, where I was still sitting on the step. I saw his face, chopped into light and shadow, his eyes hard and unforgiving. “Don’t disobey me, or it will be the worse for you.”
Despite his threat, I waited until after he had gone, the villagers with him, and slipped outside, meaning to warn Maud, but of course I had been too late.
I turned my back on the burning cottage and plunged into the woods after Maud. It was an overcast day and, amongst the trees, it was darker still, but that was to my advantage. I knew these woods better than Maud’s pursuers, and so did she; we had spent many an hour here gathering roots and bark. I leapt ditches and rotting wood, scanning the trees for a glimpse of her. Several times I thought I saw the corner of her ragged cloak disappearing behind a fat oak or the flick of her heel at the crest of a slope, but I was always mistaken. I had no way of knowing which way she had gone.
I stopped to consider. My breath came in shallow gasps as I looked around for some clue, some hint of a trail; a broken branch, a footprint or perhaps a deliberate sign. Maud and I had always used stones to mark paths in the woods, would she have thought of that now? Would she have left signs if she knew I was following her? I went on, this time more slowly, more methodically, but I didn’t find any fresh markers. I had lost her.
I was sunk in disappointment, but then I saw a flurry of crows lifting from their roost, yarking with effrontery; something had disturbed them. I started to run again, too excited to think clearly, too desperate for caution. I burst breathlessly into a grassy clearing, looking around wildly, but instead of Maud, I saw two men wading through the tall grass.
They saw me at once. How could they not, I had blundered straight into their path. I hesitated, wondering whether to run or not.
“It’s Anne, the wool merchant’s daughter,” one of them barked out.
“Get after her,” the other said, already running towards me. “The cleric will pay us a shilling each if she’s caught.”
I bolted back towards the trees. I still thought I could get away, and I probably would have, had I not run straight into the dairyman, Michael Porter, standing in the shadow of a dying beech.
“Well, well, what have we here?” he said, his thick arms snapping shut around me.
*
Copyright Anna Nagel © 2013