The Vanishing Witch (19 page)

‘Will you dine with us, Father Remigius?’ Robert asked, only from obligation: he had no desire to entertain
him.

The priest gazed longingly at the table, then glumly shook his head. ‘I’d best be about my work.’ He made the sign of the cross in front of the two men, who bowed their heads sullenly.

As soon as the door to the street had closed behind the priest, Robert strode to the table. Ripping off a chunk of bread he dipped it into the stew and ravenously shoved it into his mouth. ‘Eat, boy,’ he
murmured thickly.

‘I’m not hungry, Father.’

‘Then sit down and watch me. How have things been in my absence at the warehouse?’

Jan marched to the table and poured himself a generous quantity of wine, spilling some in the process. It was only when Robert saw his hand clasping the stem of the goblet that he registered there was blood on it. He gestured towards the cut, with a piece of beaver’s
tail he’d speared on his knife. ‘Cut yourself? You’ve torn your gypon too. Had an accident?’

Jan flung himself into a chair and tossed back the wine. ‘It was nothing,’ he said savagely. ‘Florentines again. Matthew Johan and his brothers causing trouble as usual.’

Robert’s eyes narrowed. ‘What happened?’

Jan stared up at the great boar in the tapestry on the wall, laying its head in the lap
of the Saxon princess, as if he’d only just noticed it. The gold thread of the boar’s collar glinted in the flames of the fire. Jan seemed to be steeling himself to break some disagreeable news and his hesitation alarmed Robert.

‘Out with it, lad!’

‘Merchants from Florence left Lincoln with goods they hadn’t paid for. Nigh on fifty pounds’ worth of our wool and cloth, and far more besides from
the other Lincoln merchants.’

‘What?’ The knife clattered from Robert’s grasp. ‘You let them run off with our goods? Why didn’t you stop them?’

Jan flushed. ‘I didn’t know they were going to disappear. We’d traded with them before and they had a bond . . . Besides, the other merchants were selling to them. We’d have lost out if we hadn’t.’

‘And we have lost dearly because we did,’ Robert snapped.
‘How much did they take from the other merchants?’

‘Nearly five hundred pounds’ worth, thieving foreigners! They’re all members of the Society of Albertini, the same one the Johan brothers belong to. It was the Albertini that issued the bond. I went to the mayor and told him the Johan brothers were plainly part of the fraud. He had his bailiffs seize goods and money from their warehouses and
homes. Not as much as the merchants lost in total, but I went with them to make sure we got enough to cover our losses. I told the Florentines that if they wanted it back they could reclaim the worth from their own society brothers. They didn’t take kindly to that.’ He sucked at his bleeding knuckle.

Robert grunted. ‘At least that’s something. Was that where you were hurt?’

Jan shook his head.
‘I met some of them in the street this evening, drunk as a wheelbarrow. Matthew started yelling it was my fault his warehouse had been raided and drew his sword.’

‘Brawling’s forbidden in Lincoln,’ Robert said sharply. ‘If the sheriff—’

‘Defending yourself when a man’s drawn a blade isn’t against the law. Anyway, he ran off with a good deep cut across his sword arm, threatening all the vengeance
of Hell, but for now he’s in no state to do anything about it. The sooner we throw every foreign merchant out of Lincoln, the better off we’ll all be.’

‘Aye, I heard many a man say that these last—’

An agonised scream split the air above their heads. Chairs clattered to the floor as both men raced for the stairs, Beata running up behind them. Jan burst into the chamber, Robert hard on his heels.

The bed curtains were open. Edith lay motionless, her head twisted back at an unnatural angle. Her eyes were wide open and only the whites were showing. The gag had been removed from her mouth. Her hands were bound, but the fingers were twisted, as if she’d been trying to claw at something.

Catlin stood by the bed, her head lifted as if she was staring at something or someone standing on its
other side. Without turning, she said quietly, ‘Her suffering is at an end. It is finished.’

‘No!’ Jan howled.

He rushed to the bed, pushing Catlin aside with such force that she staggered and fell. He seized his mother by the shoulders and shook her, pleading with her to wake. Robert strode over and helped Catlin to her feet, holding her arm as she swayed against him. Jan was sobbing and fumbling
with the linen strips that bound his mother’s hands to the bed. Robert stepped away from Catlin and pressed a heavy hand on his son’s shoulder, pushing him down onto his knees. ‘Leave the cloth. Pray for her soul,’ he said, his voice broken.

The young man crumpled, his face buried in the bed covering.

Beata stood in the doorway, tears rolling down her face. Then she moved forward, bent over
her mistress and passed a hand over her eyes, trying to ease the lids down, but they wouldn’t shut. Fixed and wide, they remained staring backwards into her head.

Catlin’s breath caught in a little sob. Robert wrapped his arms around her and held her tenderly. She turned her face into his chest and clung to him.

‘Don’t distress yourself, my dear. There’s nothing more any of us could have done.’

Tenney appeared in the doorway. He stared at the corpse in the bed. Then he pulled the hood from his head, twisting it awkwardly in his hands. ‘I’ll be fetching Father Remigius, then, and the nuns for the laying out . . . I’m right sorry to see her go, Master Robert. She could be hard to please, but she was a decent woman.’

Robert nodded.

‘Will you be wanting me to fetch young Adam too?’

Robert
had not registered that his younger son was missing, but now he realised he hadn’t seen the boy since he had returned that evening. ‘Where is he?’

Beata, her face wet with tears, picked at the knots of the linen strips that bound her mistress’s hands. ‘
She
took him. Said hearing his mother in pain was upsetting the boy. But he should have been here to say goodbye to her.’

Catlin lifted her head
and gazed into Robert’s eyes. ‘I thought it best, Robert. No child should have to hear his mother screaming in agony or watch the convulsions. It was too distressing for him. Much better that they said their farewells while she still knew him. I sent him to my house to spend time with my own child, under the care of Diot.’

Robert was a little annoyed. A son should be present at the deathbed of
a parent, however young he was . . . Or perhaps Catlin had been right to send him away. The last thing Edith would have wanted was for Adam to be frightened. She had tried so hard to disguise her pain from him when she was first taken ill. She would doubtless have sent him away herself, had she been in her own mind.

‘It was kind of you, Mistress Catlin,’ he said, ‘but he’ll have to—’

‘It was
not kind,’ Jan shouted, scrambling to his feet. ‘She wormed her way in here when my mother was too sick to understand what was going on. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why, Father? Why should a stranger want to take care of a woman she’s never even met?’

Beata lowered her head, busying herself in tying a linen strip across Edith’s open eyes in a vain attempt to close them.

‘Now you listen
to me, boy,’ Robert bellowed. ‘This good woman has worn herself out caring for your mother and—’

Jan strode to the door. ‘It was not my mother she cared for, Father. Even a child can see that.’

‘Come back and apologise to Mistress Catlin,’ Robert roared at him. ‘I’ll not have any son of mine speak so to a guest in my house.’

Jan glared at him with undisguised hatred. ‘She’s no guest, Father.
She’s a leech – and there is only one thing you should do with leeches and that’s burn them off your skin before they get their hooks into you and start sucking your blood.’ He stormed out, slamming the door behind him.

‘How dare you?’ Robert strode across the room, his fists clenched, his face scarlet with rage.

But Catlin ran in front of him, barring his way. ‘Let him go,’ she begged. ‘Grief
makes people say strange things. He’ll see how wrong he is, when the shock passes. It’s your beloved wife you must attend to now. You have her funeral to arrange.’

Robert breathed deeply, trying to calm himself. His wife was lying there dead on the bed in front of him and he was quarrelling with his son in front of the two servants, who were listening to all that passed. He was appalled at himself.
What must Catlin think of him? He ran his fingers distractedly through his hair, trying to collect his thoughts. ‘Tenney, fetch the priest and the nuns, and on the way back collect Adam.’

‘Let me go for Adam,’ Catlin said. ‘He must be told his mother has died and I think such sad tidings are better delivered by a woman and mother who can comfort him, not a servant. He’ll want to cry, but he’d
be too proud to do so before a man. He is growing up faster than you think, Robert.’

If a witch plunges her broom into water, pulls it out and shakes it, she will cause much rain to fall.

The nuns of St Magdalene wouldn’t let me touch Mistress Edith’s body. They sent me to fetch water, rags and sweet herbs, then brushed me into the corner, like some scullion, to watch as they washed my mistress and laid her out in her finest kirtle of Lincoln Green wool, which
made her face look like a wrinkled yellow apple. Her body was so thin it was as if the gown had been hung on a scarecrow. I fetched the gown in which she’d been wed. She was as slender as a birch tree back then. It’d have fitted her once more. But the nuns ignored me as if I was nowt but a yapping dog.

They wound a clean linen cloth round her poor shaven head, laid a crucifix on her breast and
set a distaff in her hand, though she’d never used one since she was a girl. On Master Robert’s instructions they placed a necklace of pearls around her throat, and rings on her fingers, for he’d not have his wife going out unadorned even into her grave. But the pearls only made my mistress’s face look more ravaged, as if she’d died months before and this was some cruel mockery of her decay, like
putting rosebuds in the hair of a withered crone.

As soon as they’d gone, I returned to do those things for her they’d not do. I removed the bandage that tied her bruised jaw shut and placed a coin in the cold mouth, before tying it again. I sprinkled salt on her breast, hid rowan twigs in her shoes and slipped a small iron padlock beneath her skirts over her private parts. In short I did all
that I could to keep the evil spirits from entering her, so that her soul might be at peace, but what peace could there be for a woman who’d had her life so cruelly wrested from her?

I should have been with her when she died. I should have been the one to care for her in her last days. I’d cared for her all her married life, when she was sick and when she was well, when she was brought to bed
with child and when she sobbed over their little dead bodies. I shouldn’t have let that woman drive me out. My mistress wasn’t mad, she wasn’t.

Father Remigius waited for the funeral procession a short way from the church then led it the final few yards until Mistress Edith’s coffin came to rest in the lich-gate. The bell-ringer began to toll the six tellers for the death of a woman, then a note
for each of the fifty years of her life. When all your years are counted in the ringing of a single bell, they seem so brief, so lonely.

We laid Mistress Edith’s body in a stone coffin in the churchyard for it to dry. In time, when the smell had gone and the corpse fluids run out, she would be laid to rest beneath the floor of the church and Master Robert would order a fine stone to place over
it, with her likeness carved upon it – a devoted mother and faithful wife. Faithfulness, yes. Men set great store by faithfulness in their wives.

They all gathered round the grave as Father Remigius mumbled away in his Latin. Master Robert had given new black robes to twelve poor men from the parish and paid them to flank the coffin, holding great thick candles, whose guttering flames they carefully
shielded from the wind – they didn’t want to forfeit the coins he had promised them. No more did the choir boys, who held the lighted tapers as they sang
dirige
. It was an impressive sight and Master Robert intended it to be so. He would not have it said he had dispatched his wife like a pauper.

Nor would she soon be forgotten for he’d given pennies to the sick and bedridden to pray for her soul
and several fine pieces of silver to the merchants’ church. He also paid two chantry priests to say masses weekly for Edith to shorten her days in Purgatory, with a promise of more to come if they carried out their duties diligently.

But come the day of the funeral, Jan and his father stood side by side, their eyes as dry as sand in Hell. Jan had wept for his mother when he was alone. I’d seen
his swollen eyes when he emerged from the bedchamber after his vigil, but not Master Robert’s. Not that I’d ever seen him weep. Some men don’t. They’re born without tears.Besides, a man in business can’t afford to show weakness, if grief can be counted as such.

Master Robert had taught his sons to bear their pain in silence too. Little Adam walked between his father and brother behind the coffin
in the procession, his eyes fixed on the ground, never once looking up at the wooden box containing his mother. When they removed her from the carrying coffin and lowered her body into the stone one, his face had been as stiff and wooden as a painted angel. He’d stared fixedly at a pair of red kites wheeling above our heads. Master Robert did not try to comfort the boy. I dare say he was struggling
too hard to maintain his own stiff dignity. Once or twice I saw Jan lay a hand on his brother’s shoulder and squeeze it, but neither looked at the other.

Tenney, though, is as tender as a slice of veal, not that he’d ever admit it. We’d both been so busy with visitors calling to sit with the mourners, preparing the funeral meats and running errands that we’d not had a moment to bless ourselves.
I’d had no time to grieve, even at night, for I was so exhausted my eyes closed before my head touched the pallet.