Alchemy and Meggy Swann (2 page)

A sudden breeze tugged at the hair that tumbled like storm clouds from her linen cap and tangled in her eyes and mouth. She said naught but only frowned back at the man's long face, the long nose, and those great bushy eyebrows. Her gran had admonished her often, "Do not greet the world with your fists up, sweeting. Give folk a chance." But her gran was dead, and Meggy was here, and her hands on her sticks clenched into fists.

The man and the girl stood in silence until he called to the carter, "God's wounds, is she mute? Or brain cracked?"

The carter shrugged once more as he climbed onto the wagon and tossed Meggy's sack over the side.

"Hold, fellow!" Master Ambrose shouted. "Hold. What use is a daughter to me?" But the carter merely clucked to his horse, which pulled the wagon up the street and away.

They stood for a long moment, the man in the doorway and Meggy on the step. Finally he turned and entered the house, leaving her to follow.

Brain cracked, he had called her. A daughter, not a son. Ye toads and vipers, he would have more disappointments to deal with this day, Meggy thought. She leaned on her walking sticks and, dipping and lurching, moved herself into the house—stick, swing, drag, stick, swing, drag—pain accompanying her every step.

The man turned and watched her, one caterpillar arching on his brow. Shoving past her, he strode back to the door and shouted after the wagon, "Good sir, hold, I said! The girl be ... she cannot ... I want..." But the wagon was disappearing up the darkening lane.

Master Ambrose sighed and closed the door. "I know not what I am to do with you. A son would be of use to me, but a daughter, and such a daughter..." He did not look at her but walked to the staircase in a corner of the room. "Roger," he called. "Roger, come down."

A young fellow a year or two older than Meggy, wearing brown doublet and hose of strawberry red, pounded down the stairs. He grinned at Meggy and his hair flopped into his eyes. "Roger," said Master Ambrose, "this be ... err, my ... err, daughter. See to her. I must return to my work."

The boy called Roger nodded as the man started up the stairs. Then the boy picked up Meggy's sack from the doorstep and said, "Go to! So the master has a daughter. I bid you welcome." But his grin faded as he gestured toward her walking sticks. "What means those?"

Meggy had had a long day. She had left her home and been bounced in a wagon over bumpy roads, assailed by smells and mud and noise, and then insulted by a man said to be her father. She was not in the best of humors. And now this boy was vexing her with his big eyes and his annoyous prattle. She pulled her face into a scowl and shook one of her walking sticks at him. "Beware the ugglesome crookleg, the foul-featured cripple, the fearful, misshapen creature," she growled, "marked by the Devil himself."

The boy backed up against the wall, but he did not run. In the village where Meggy was born, the children ran. Meggy seldom went among the villagers, but when she did, they jeered or shunned her, cursed and spat, and mothers pulled their toddlers behind their skirts for fear she would bewitch them with the evil eye. This boy did not run or spit or curse.

She narrowed her eyes. "Be you not afeared?" she asked him.

He stared at her solemnly but said nothing. He would come to fear her or taunt her or avoid her, Meggy knew. Everyone did. Everyone but Louise.

"My mother held that my crooked legs are the judgment of God upon me for my sins," Meggy said. "She bade me stay out of sight lest I curse our patrons and make the ale sour.
Now
be you afeared?"

He cocked his head, and his brown hair fell forward like the long ears of a spaniel pup. "Indeed I know not what to think of you," he said. "But you be my master's daughter, so take some comfort and rest." He moved a stool closer to where Meggy stood. "I cannot offer you a fire. The master will not spare the wood. But for the room at the top of the stairs, the rest of this house is cold as January all the year round."

He pointed to a straw pallet folded into a corner. "You can sleep on that. I found it lumpy and dusty, but it serves. The water bearer will come each sevennight, for it is clear you cannot fetch water yourself. And there is this." He gestured to the chamber pot beside the pallet and turned for the door.

"Nay, hold!" Meggy called. "You cannot abandon me. What am I to do here? Who will tend to me? And fetch me things to eat?"

"Belike you will fetch it yourself," Roger said. "Up Crooked Lane to Eastcheap you will find taverns, fruit-mongers, and bakers. Where Fish Street Hill changes to Gracechurch there be grocers and butchers. But closest are the cookshops and brewers on Thames Street, down Crooked Lane instead of up and toward the river to where Fish Street Hill meets the church of St. Magnus and—"

"Can you not see, rude sir, that I could ne'er walk all that way?" She waved her walking sticks at him. Because her legs often tormented her, she had to measure the gain of each journey against the pain—would the reward be worth it? Roger, the lack-witted woodsnape, could not understand that.

"Did you not walk and work and such in that village you came from?" he asked.

"I stayed out of the way, is what I did there. And there was ever bread in the alehouse kitchen when I grew hungry." She sighed loudly. "You will have to fetch me food."

The boy laughed. "I will see you anon," he said, "but now I must be off to supper and bed in my new lodgings." Sweeping his hat onto his head, he bade her a good even. He was laughing again as he left.

Now Meggy was alone, hungry and thirsty and frightened in the dark house in the middle of the night. Despair settled over her like the wings of a great dark bird. She pulled her cloak over her head and settled back into her nightmares.

Morning came at last, as it ever does. Ere Meggy opened her eyes, she listened for the familiar sounds of home—cock crow, breezes singing in the tall grass, cows lowing to be milked, the greetings and fare-thee-wells of travelers—but there were none such. Instead she heard church bells clanging, men arguing, the calls of peddlers and the screeching of gulls.

It had not been a dream. She was still in London, in the house of Master Peevish. She frowned. If he was her father, did that then make her Mistress Peevish? It suits me, I fear, she thought, and moved her lips in what might have been a tiny smile.

Leaning heavily on her sticks, she pulled herself up off the floor. She found the chamber pot and, cursing this little house that had no privy such as the alehouse had, she managed, with a great deal of arranging and rearranging, to use it. Opening the door, she threw the contents into the stinking ditch that flowed past the house and placed the pot back in the corner. She found a bit of wood in the street and used that to clean up after Louise, who had done in the night what geese do, and that, too, Meggy threw into the street. Then she folded the straw mat and put it next to the chamber pot.

Hunger and curiosity both poked at her, and she looked about. This seemed a poor, puny, paltry sort of house. There was but the one small room—no dining chamber, no kitchen, no pantry, no buttery for storage, no cupboard. Dust motes danced in the pale sunlight peeping through the window and settled on a lone wooden table and benches. The empty fireplace held no fire, no andirons, no pothooks or bellows or spit for meat. And nowhere was there aught to eat.

She had missed her supper the night before, although the boy Roger, fie upon him, had gone home to his. What was she to do to quiet her grumbling belly?

She longed for the alehouse where she had lived with her mother and her gran, poor and plain as it had been. She missed the scents of fresh ale and clean rushes and meat turning on the spit. This house stank of dust and mildew and, from somewhere, a foul reek like hen's eggs gone rotten. All in all it did not seem a place where people truly lived.

Meggy sat down at the table and drew an M in the dust on the top. Would Master Peevish come downstairs? Did he even recall that she was there? Would the boy in the brown doublet come back? She had not used him very kindly. He had seemed a friendly sort, but she cared not about being friends. People do not favor me, she thought, nor I them. "I need no friend but you, Louise. You do not mind that sometimes I be Mistress Peevish," she said to the goose. "But what am I to do in this place? I have no food, no one to comfort or help or listen to me. Master Peevish would have an able-bodied son, not a crippled daughter. What am I to do?" Louise, of course, did not answer.

If she could find sixpence for the carter, she could return to the village and the alehouse, perhaps, but she would receive a cold welcome there. As the carter had remarked, her mother—the village alewife, known for her good ale and her bad temper—had not been sorry to see the girl go. "My mother cannot stomach me," Meggy had often said to Louise. "I might as well have two heads, like the calf born on Roland Pigeon's farm."

Once it was apparent that Meggy would be lame, she had been put in the care of her gran, who dwelt in rooms over the alehouse stable. Sweet Granny, with gnarled hands and a face like a pickle, had given her love and warmth and kept her mostly out of sight. It was her gran who had found likely sticks in the woods and showed the girl how to use them for walking. But Granny had died two winters past, and without her broad back and strong arms to carry the girl up and down the ladder in the stable, Meggy had to return to the alehouse and her mother.

And then yestermorn, just afore dawn, "Your father, master at the Sign of the Sun in London, has bid you come to him," her mother had said. "You leave this morning."

"Nay, 'tis not so," said Meggy. "I have no father." Certes she had a father; everyone has a father. But never in her thirteen years had Meggy heard her mother speak of him. Her gran had merely said, "You have a mother who feeds you and a gran who loves you. What need have you of a father?" Still, Meggy had at times wondered and imagined what and where this father was. Was he tall? Lean limbed or swag bellied? Did he smell of wood smoke and horses or of ink and musty books? Did he have black hair like hers? Was he, too, lame?

"Why have you ne'er told me of him?" Meggy had asked her mother yestermorn. "Why has he been so long gone, and why am I to go to him now?"

Her mother shrugged. "Belike you will find out soon enough."

And so Meggy was in London, unwanted by father as well as mother. What was she to do? Ye toads and vipers.

Meggy lingered there, thinking and fretting, until, with a slam of the big wooden door, Roger bounced into the room.

So he had come back. Meggy thought he looked ever more like a puppy, all friendliness and no brains. She was relieved and annoyed and mightily hungry, but all she said was "Ahh, methought I heard the door open and a mighty wind blow in. What will you, puppy?"

"See what I have brought, fresh from the larder of Mistress Grimm." He unfolded a cloth from around a heel of bread and a hunk of yellow cheese and handed her a bit of each. "I had to draw a sword and fight a rat for the cheese, but I vanquished him, and here it be." Not knowing whether he jested or not, Meggy inspected her bit of cheese for marks of rat teeth.

The boy fetched a mug from the windowsill. "You must drink from clay, I fear. The master has melted or sold all the metal in the house." That explained the lack of andirons, pots, and pothooks, Meggy thought, but why would he do so?

The boy poured some of the ale from the tankard he carried into Meggy's mug. "Have you seen him this day?" he asked, sitting across from her at the table.

She shook her head but said naught, her mouth full of bread.

"In sooth 'tis a poor welcome he has given you," the boy said, "but you will grow accustomed to his ways in time. He can be forgetful, his head filled with philosophy and such, and sometimes he be frosty as a winter night, though he will not beat you or berate you overmuch." He stood up suddenly and smacked his head with his hand. "But I forget my manners. Roger Oldham, if it please you, mistress," he said with a small bow.

"Old-dumb?"

"No, Old-ham. O-L-D as in old, H-A-M as in, well, ham."

"Or pork. Or pigmeat. Well, Roger Old-pigmeat, I am Margret Swann," said Meggy after swallowing. "And this is Louise," she added, gesturing toward the goose, who waddled up to Roger and nipped him on his knee.

"Hellborn bird!" Roger shouted. "She has bitten me!" He sat down again and rubbed his leg as Louise, with a great fluff of her feathers, settled herself.

"I think she simply be curious about how you taste," said Meggy.

"If she does not leave off my leg, I will be knowing how
she
tastes," he responded.

"I pray you, Master Oldmeat, no roast goose jests where Louise might hear." The girl took another great bite of bread and asked through a mouthful, "Are you servant here?"

Still rubbing his leg, Roger shook his head. "Nay, no longer. I was two years setting fires and sweeping ashes, fetching food from the cookshop and water from the conduit, washing linen and airing clothes, shopping for beakers and bottles, powders and potions, and assisting the master in his work. Now I go elsewhere, so he summons you."

"He wants me to be his servant? That is why he called for me?" Meggy trembled with anger and disappointment. "I cannot be a servant. My legs are crooked and my arms busy with my sticks. Walking pains me, and climbing, and standing. I go seldom among strangers, for they spit and curse at me, and this London makes my head ache." She struggled to her feet. "A pox on it. Go and tell your master that I have left his house and will trouble him no more. And he can make a hundred able-bodied sons to serve him—it matters not to me."