The Vanishing Witch

by Karen Maitland

  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.’

  Chapter 19

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

  Beata

  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 al
l 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.

  But when I saw them lay the lid upon my poor mistress’s coffin, shutting her up alone in the dark, and when I heard that awful rasp of stone on stone, I felt as if the skin was being ripped from my heart and I fell to sobbing. That great ox Tenney shuffled a little closer and shoved his arm about me, patting me awkwardly. ‘There, lass, she’s at peace. No cause to take on so,’ he said.

  But I heard the catch in his voice, and when I glanced up, I saw a tear running down his cheeks and sinking into his thick black beard.

  The churchyard was crowded. All of Master Robert’s guild brothers and their wives had come, as well as neighbours, relatives, tenants and workmen, not out of grief for my mistress, most barely knew her, but to show their loyalty to Robert. He was an influential man, and men like him had long memories and long fingers. Few would risk slighting him.

  As soon as the service was over, the congregation filed past the master and his sons to murmur words of consolation. All of my attention had been on the family and on poor Mistress Edith’s coffin, and in that great throng I hadn’t noticed if Widow Catlin was there or not. But as the crowd began to thin, she suddenly appeared a few yards behind Master Robert, flanked by that filthy old besom, Diot, and Leonia. For a moment it gave me quite a turn, seeing them standing there so still, gazing at Edith’s coffin, like three ravens watching for the chance to feed on a carcass.

  As if he sensed Widow Catlin behind him, Master Robert turned towards her. He had taken a few steps in her direction when he seemed to remember he’d been talking to a fellow guild member and turned back to excuse himself before walking over to the widow. Catlin nodded to him as formally as any woman there, as if they were mere acquaintances, but it didn’t fool Edith’s cousin, Maud, not for a flea’s breath.

  Ever since the night of Mistress Edith’s death, Master Robert had instructed Tenney and me to say that he was out whenever Maud came calling and he’d avoided her throughout the funeral. But there was no avoiding her now. She picked up her skirts and charged across to him, spitting and railing.

  ‘. . . your whoring that killed her. She died of shame and a broken heart. Wicked, that’s what you are . . . a fornicator!’

  Master Robert spun around to face her, his arms outstretched on either side as if he were trying to shield Widow Catlin from an assassin. ‘And you are a foul-mouthed old gossip,’ he yelled, his face turning scarlet. ‘You were forever pouring your malice into my wife’s mind. If anyone killed her it was you, filling her head with fears and jealousies that had no ground. They ought to duck you in the Braytheforde.’

  Everyone was goggling at them with undisguised fascination, as if this were a mummers’ play. Jan ran up and tried to pull Maud away, but she was having none of it. Finally Father Remigius puffed his way over to the pair and pushed himself between them.

  ‘These are evil words to be spoken with the Blessed Host still on your lips. Show some respect for the poor woman who lies in her grave at your feet.’

  With an angry shrug, Robert stalked away, but it took several more earnest entreaties from the priest to prevent Maud running after him and berating him once more. Widow Catlin had melted into the crowd and was nowhere to be seen.

  I was turning away, too, when I felt a small, cold hand slip into mine. I glanced down. Adam was standing beside me, his face as pale as whey and his jaw clenched. He stared at Robert’s retreating back. ‘Father didn’t kill my mother,’ he whispered, so low that I could barely hear him.

  ‘Course he didn’t, Adam,’ I said. ‘Take no notice of Mistress Maud.’

  Adam’s chest heaved. ‘I killed her.’

  Chapter 20

  If a diamond-shaped crease, called a coffin, is seen in a newly ironed sheet, someone who sleeps in that bed will die. If the coffin is seen in a carelessly ironed tablecloth it foretells imminent death for one of the people seated round that table.

  Lincoln

  A long flight of steps and a cobbled slope run side by side up the hill from the cluster of hovels in Butwerk, outside the city walls, to the postern gate of the cathedral precincts. They call this way the Greesen. By day it is always crowded with pilgrims and ox carts, pedlars and goodwives, but at night only the foolhardy venture down it, for this, my darlings, is where the ghosts of Lincoln gather. On the cathedral side of the archway lies holy ground, but this side belongs to those who are neither alive nor dead. We ghosts loiter there most dark evenings. Some slide through the stones as if they were made of mist, which to them they are: they left life long before the walls were ever built. Others laboriously climb the steps as if they still lived.

  The monk who hanged himself from the postern gate resents our gathering. He was a miserable old sod in life, and death has made him no more sociable. He seems to think that because he died on the spot, he has some claim to it, but tho
ugh the creaking of his noose and his moaning may send the living fleeing in terror, ghosts are not to be deterred.

  Other things swarm around the Greesen too. Creatures abandoned by their creator long, long ago. Beasts, half fish and half reptile, with jagged-toothed jaws, claw up those steep steps on their sharp fins, while ugly black birds with long cruel beaks and human eyes greedily watch the people who scuttle down the stone stairs below. A malevolent darkness flows down those steps, oozing from the tombs of those who lie buried in the cathedral above. Trust me, my darlings, you don’t want to climb them at night.

  It was late in the evening when Jan, a girl clinging to his arm, wove his way down a narrow alley between the darkened houses and out onto the Greesen. The stairs were dark and deserted. At intervals along the walls torches guttered, sending shadows slithering between the pools of orange light. Far below, bright pinpoints of yellow and red twinkled in the distant valley, marking where boatmen far from home were sleeping on the riverbanks or shepherds warmed themselves as they kept watch.

  The girl hung back, tugging on Jan’s arm. ‘Not down there. There’s summit that grabs your ankle when you walk up those steps, pulls you back down again. My friend skinned both her knees and spilled all the fish from her basket.’

  Jan giggled and flicked the girl’s nose with his finger. ‘If he tries to grab your pretty little ankle, I’ll chop his hand off.’

  He fumbled for his sword hilt, but his hand got twisted in the folds of his cloak.

  ‘It’s a woman that grabs you,’ the girl said. ‘Anyhow, you’ll break your neck on those stairs. You’re so pickled you can hardly walk straight on the flat.’

  ‘True!’ Jan said affably. ‘That’s why you’ll have to come with me. My lodgings . . . nice warm bed. Just you and me and a flagon of wine. Forget about the whole damn lot of them.’

  Slipping his hand round her waist, he drew her tightly to him, kissing the base of her throat, before propelling her towards the steps. She laughed and allowed herself to be pulled along.