The Plague Charmer

by Karen Maitland

  ‘Look at that! The little man’s caught himself a woman.’

  ‘Easy does it. Don’t jerk her. She could have broken bones.’

  They were going to be bloody furious when they realised they’d been hauling up a corpse, but she was my corpse. And I was the thief who had stolen her from the sea.

  Chapter 6

  Sara

  Fish bones must never be burned, but cast back into the sea else the fish will not return.

  ’Twas to my door they brought her. Not that my cottage wasn’t already full to the rafters with Elis’s sister, Aldith, her husband Daveth and their three chillern, as well as Goda, Elis’s youngest sister, whose belly was swollen with a babe.

  Elis and Daveth carried the poor woman in. They brought the wind in with them an’ all, sending the dried bracken on the floor whirling and the flames of the hearth fire gusting so wildly it was a mercy the one didn’t set the other ablaze. Even the crowd of menfolk who squashed in the doorway, peering in curiously, could not keep out the blast of the storm. I snatched away some pots and wooden bowls as Elis and Daveth laid the woman down on the narrow table, for there was no place else to put her.

  ‘Should I fetch Father Cuthbert?’ someone called.

  ‘By the time you find him, it’ll be too late, I reckon,’ another said.

  ‘Already is, I’d say. Should’ve tossed her straight back. She’d have taken the storm back out to sea with her.’

  ‘Out, out, all of you,’ I ordered, ‘and shut that door behind you afore the wind lifts the thatch clean off.’

  But they couldn’t seem to drag their eyes from the bedraggled woman, especially that queer little dwarf who lives in the cave on the shore. Makes my skin crawl, he does, the way he’s always grinning, even when there’s nothing to laugh at. He was doing it again right there in my cottage, as if a poor drowned woman was a huge joke to him. Spiteful, I call it.

  Exasperated, I poked a couple of the men in the belly with the end of my broom, pushing them out of my doorway until they finally retreated, dragging the door closed behind them.

  The flames of the fire steadied and the bracken fell back to cover the beaten-earth floor, but none of us stirred. We just stared at the woman on the table, as seawater dripped from her sodden skirts and long hair. Her eyes were closed, her lips blue.

  Elis, who was closest, pressed the flat of his hand over the woman’s chest, then grimly shook his head.

  Aldith bustled forward, pushed him aside, rubbed the blade of her knife against her skirts and held it close to the woman’s lips. She peered at the blade. ‘She’s breathing. See? It’s misty!’

  ‘That’ll be naught but damp from her skin rising in the heat of the fire,’ Elis said.

  Aldith rounded on her brother. ‘I’ve brought enough babbies into this world to tell if a body’s breathing or not.’

  Goda whimpered and her hand flew to her swollen belly.

  ‘Don’t you fret,’ I said quickly. ‘This ’un’ll come out alive, won’t it, Aldith?’

  Goda had been with child once before, but that baby had never drawn breath. Aldith reckoned it had died days before in her womb, though Goda had refused to admit that anything was wrong till the fever had taken hold. It was a miracle she’d not died too.

  Aldith was vigorously chafing the woman’s hands between her own. ‘Here, help me turn her over. She’ll have swallowed a barrel of seawater and sooner that’s out of her the better. Course, if the menfolk had thought to carry her face down, she’d have coughed it up b’now. But that’s the trouble with men, don’t think, do they?’

  ‘She’d still be under waves if we’d not pulled her out,’ her husband said indignantly.

  Aldith ignored him, though Daveth was used to that. She nodded to me. ‘Need to get her wet clothes off too. Chill her to the marrow, they will.’

  As soon as the woman was turned, water dribbled from her mouth and by the time we’d stripped her and rubbed her cold, clammy limbs and chest vigorously with warm goose-fat, she was coughing and her chest was rising and falling rapidly, though she’d still not opened her eyes.

  All the time Aldith and I worked, my Elis and Daveth crouched by the fire spooning down bowls of pottage to warm themselves, but their eyes kept darting back to the woman as if she was the rarest beauty they’d seen. When they thought I’d seen them gawping, they’d sheepishly look away again, like youths caught peeking at a naked girl through a casement. But they were not boys and the stranger was no blushing maid.

  She was handsome enough in her own way, I suppose. Well, she would have been, if she’d had a peck of flesh on her to fill out those hollow cheeks. It was hard to place her age in the dim light of the rush candles: maybe forty or so. Her hair was long, thick and dark, but streaked with white. She was no high-born lady. Used to hard work by the looks of it, for her body, though bruised and bleeding from the rocks, was lean and tough, the muscles of her arms and belly hard. She’d a livid scar on her shoulder, a wound not long healed, and a mark on her belly low down near her bush of black hair. Dark blue it was, the colour of a new bruise, and that’s what I thought it was at first, just another bruise. But then I realised it was the picture of an eye, wide open, staring right at you. I mean, who would paint an eye on their body and down there too? I tried to scrub it off with a bit of rag, but it wouldn’t budge. So I covered it quick afore the menfolk could see it.

  She was alive and breathing, but even strong vinegar wafted under her nose wouldn’t rouse her. Nor could she be induced to swallow so much as a sip of warmed ale. So, there was no help for it but to lay her down on the old sheepskins we used under the packs of the horses and wait to see if, come dawn, she’d be among the living or the dead.

  I snuffed out the rush lights and banked down the fire as we all settled down for what was left of the night, squashed tight as herrings in a barrel. The others were soon grunting and snoring but, exhausted though I was, I couldn’t sleep. Now that the voices in the cottage had fallen silent, the wind shrieked louder than ever, rattling and banging every loose thing. I lay in the only bed in the cottage, alongside Goda, wondering if the next creak or groan meant a tree was about to crash down on our roof or the rocks from the hillside above were hurtling towards us.

  A flash of blue lightning burst through the cracks in the shutters. Startled, I turned my head. The woman’s eyes were wide open, like the eye on her belly. I sat up, thinking that if she’d recovered her senses only to find herself lying in some strange place, she’d be afeared.

  ‘You’re safe now,’ I whispered, ‘among friends . . . Shall I fetch you some ale . . . a bowl of pottage?’

  But as another flash lit up the cottage, I saw the woman’s eyes were closed again and she lay as still as death.

  Aldith’s youngest son, Kitto, woke first. His wails dragged the rest of us groaning from our sleep. Soon as I remembered, I glanced over to the pile of sheepskins, fearing the worst, but the place where the woman had lain was empty. Maybe she’d not been human at all, but a sea-sprite or the ghost of a drowned woman who had vanished with the first light. But Aldith’s daughter, Ibb, pointed to the door, which was unlatched. Sprites and wraiths have no need of doors, and the woman’s clothes, which I’d laid near the fire to dry, had also gone. Elis stretched and, rubbing his back, wandered out into the grey dawn. Daveth and I followed.

  Elis jerked his chin towards the meadow on the slope above us, where the hobbled packhorses were grazing. ‘At least the widgebeasts came through the storm without hurt. Brought a fair few branches down, that wind has, but ground’s still as dry as a beggar’s loaf. As soon as we’ve had a bite, I’ll go down with you to your cottage, Daveth, see what damage’s been done.’

  Daveth grimaced. ‘Be a mercy if the walls are still standing.’ His gaze strayed back to the open door of the cottage, where Aldith stood, dandling little Kitto on her hip. ‘Strange that maid going off without a word.’

  Aldith snorted. ‘That’ll teach you to go dragging queer fish fro
m the sea. Your father used to say, “If you pull anything out you can’t name, throw it back.”’

  Aldith and I set about chivvying the older boys to stir themselves. But there was scarcely room for us to move in the cottage, and as fast as one of us tried to pick up a blanket, someone else would step back on it. Aldith was soon pushing the children out through the door to fetch wood and water to give us space enough to mend the fire.

  I peered into the pot. What I’d prepared yesterday should have fed Elis and the boys for supper and breakfast as well. But the menfolk had shovelled down most of it after they’d brought the woman back, just to warm their bones, and the scrapings that were left wouldn’t fill the bellies of my own family, never mind Aldith’s brood and Goda too. But I couldn’t send them back to a cold, wet cottage without a bite of something hot inside them. Besides, who knew if they even had a cottage to return to?

  This was always a hungry time of year, with the last of the winter’s stores gone and precious little yet to harvest. If I thinned the pottage enough to make it stretch round all of us, it would be as weak as whey. Hot would be the best you could say of it, but it wouldn’t stave off the men’s hunger even till midday, and what would I give them then?

  The tang of salt-weed wafted into the cottage and a shadow fell across the room, as someone blocked the doorway. I half turned, thinking it to be Elis or Daveth, meaning to warn them the meal wasn’t ready. But it was the woman from the sea who stood there. She ambled towards me, dangling a dozen good-sized fish from a cord threaded through their gills and an armful of dripping kelp. She dropped both on to the table where only hours ago she had lain as limp as a gutted mackerel. Aside from the grazes on her face, she looked remarkably lively for a corpse.

  She gestured towards the fire. ‘Many people to feed. We must roast the fish, so we can eat quickly. There is much work to be done.’

  She spoke as if she was the mistress of the house and I the servant. I could understand her well enough, but she had a queer way of saying the words. The pedlars from the other side of the moors, who come here to trade, have a strange tongue too, but not like hers.

  I pointed at the fish. ‘You get those from the weirs?’ She said nothing. ‘There’s people own those weirs. Can’t just take—’

  ‘Fish were washed up behind the cottages,’ she said, giving me a cold stare. ‘Gulls and cats eat well today.’

  I cursed myself. Of course there’d be fish stranded on the shore after that storm. I should have thought of it myself and sent the boys out early to collect what they could. But the whole village would be out scavenging by now, as well as that monstrous cat of Matilda’s. Overfed beast it was, always hanging about the nets. It’ud maul a dozen fish, just to spoil them from spite.

  I set the boys to building a fire outside, big enough to roast all the fish at once, while I gutted them. Some I put on the spit to cook. But the sea woman wrapped the rest in the fronds of kelp – devil’s apron, Aldith calls it – baking them on stones she placed among the hot embers. Aldith watched her wrapping the fish as if she was a madman fishing for the moon and, later, when we were all gathered round and pulling the steaming fragments of flesh from the bones, I noticed that Aldith was careful to eat only the fish that I had spit-roasted. The kelp gave the fish an odd salt-sweet taste, but the menfolk didn’t seem to mind it.

  The sea woman worked and ate in silence, asking us nothing and saying not a word about her rescue until I began to wonder if she even remembered how she’d come to be here. Aldith can’t abide not knowing everything about a body, so I knew she’d not be able to contain her curiosity for long, but the woman told her only what she asked, no more.

  Her name, she said, was Janiveer.

  ‘Queer sort of a name,’ Aldith grunted. ‘You come from Wales?’

  ‘I come from a ship.’

  Had she seen others in the water? She’d seen nothing. Did the ship strike the rocks? She didn’t know. Where was the ship bound? They hadn’t told her.

  ‘But where are you going?’ Aldith persisted.

  Janiveer gazed up into the grey-clouded sky, watching a rust-coloured kite flapping over the cottage towards its usual hunting grounds of Kitnor. Those birds seldom came east to Porlock Weir, preferring to feast on the creatures of the forest and moors, rather than the fish-scraps from our village. She marked its flight into the far distance where its fellows were mere specks in the sky, gliding above the distant hills.

  ‘I go or I stay – you will choose.’

  It soon became plain that if the choice was left to Aldith, Janiveer would be going – and going a lot further than Kitnor too. All the time we were eating, Daveth could scarcely keep his eyes off her, and my Elis wasn’t much better. Janiveer didn’t flaunt herself, like some of the captains’ harlots who sail on the ships, quite the opposite: she ignored the menfolk completely, but her indifference to them seemed only to captivate them the more.

  Aldith scarcely waited for Daveth to finish eating before she chivvied him down the hill to see what could be done to dry out their cottage. She left her two youngest, Ibb and Kitto, with me to mind, for they’d be more of a hindrance than a help, but much to her annoyance her eldest, Col, had disappeared with my Luke and Hob. As Aldith hurried down the path, I assured her that I’d send Col down to help his father as soon as he returned and Luke, too, though privately I doubted I’d see any of the lads until their empty bellies drove them home.

  Janiveer was standing on top of the rise in front of the cottage, staring down at the beach below. I wondered if she was searching for any sign of the ship or those she’d sailed with. I didn’t know if she’d had a husband or family on board. As if she could feel me watching, she clambered back down, running the last few yards to keep her balance on the steep slope.

  ‘You want your sons? Up there.’ She pointed to the dense thicket above the cottage. ‘The box they took from the sea . . . it is . . .’ She wrapped her arms about her as if she was suddenly chilled. ‘They must not open it. Throw it back into deep water where it cannot be found. I warn you, do it quickly.’ She stretched out her hand, and lightly touched her finger to my forehead. ‘A life for a life.’

  Then she walked away towards the shore. I stood staring after her. The spot she had touched on my face burned cold as if I had been touched with ice.

  The sea had taken what little remained of the villagers’ winter stores, paying for what it took with the fish it had cast up on the shore for us. Everyone in the village had gathered what they could, even collecting fishes that had already been mauled by gulls, otters or Matilda’s brute of a cat. If just a mouthful or two of uneaten flesh remained, it could always be added to the pottage pots. And I would need every scrap we could gather, for Goda, Aldith and her family had returned to lodge with us at least for the next few days. Their cottage was too wet and cold to sleep in. Puddles of seawater lay on the beaten-earth floor. Their bed boards were sodden, and every pot they owned was slimed with mud and weed.

  There were too many of us to stay inside my cottage to eat, so that evening we built a great fire outside and cooked the fish the sea had given us. Seeing the blaze, others in the village climbed the slope to share the warmth, for the woodpiles next to the beach cottages had either been soaked in seawater or swept away. They brought what little food they had to share – fish, of course. What did anyone have left but fish? Old Abel tottered up and Meryn on his crutches. The dwarf sidled in, worming his way closest to the fire. Even that bitterweed Matilda came shuffling along, though her cottage had not been touched.

  But I knew what had drawn her, what had drawn all of them: not the warmth of the fire, or the smell of roasted fish, but their curiosity about Janiveer. For it’s not every day a woman is plucked alive from the sea and, stranger still, we had found no other soul from the ship, either cast on to the rocks or drifting on the waves. A few planks and spars that might have come from a stricken vessel had washed up, and a couple of staved-in barrels, but no bodies. If others had drowned
, they must have been swept out to sea. In a day or so, they might drift ashore in one of the many bays further along the coast. But if they did, not even Aldith could winkle any gossip from the mouth of a corpse.

  Janiveer said little at first, no more than she had told Aldith and me, but when Matilda asked her if God had turned the sun black over the ship, Janiveer nodded. She stared for a long time at Matilda, as if she was trying to read something in her face, like a sailor gazes at the sky, trying to read the stars.

  She gestured towards the sea, softly hissing over the shingle. ‘On the far shores, there have been many signs. In Burgundy, rain fell as blood.’

  ‘Do you all hear that?’ Matilda crowed. ‘Blood! The waters were turned to blood, just as in the plagues of Egypt.’

  ‘Burgundy – that in Egypt, then, is it?’ the lad, Crabfish, said, beaming stupidly at everyone as if he’d at last understood what someone was saying.

  People smiled indulgently and shook their heads. It was a land beyond France somewhere, they told the lad, but poor Crabfish had no notion where France was either, so he quickly lost interest and stuffed more fish into his slack mouth.

  ‘I seen it rain frogs once,’ Cador, the bailiff, said.

  ‘Aye, and fishes too,’ old Abel added.

  ‘Rained those last night, I reckon,’ Elis said, jerking his head towards the many that were roasting or boiling on the fire. ‘Could do with some real rain, though. Never known rivers run so low. Falls at Silcombe are naught but a trickle of gnat’s piss.’

  A chunter of voices broke out, all telling of this stream or that spring that had dried up or near to it.

  Janiveer’s voice rang out in the darkness, scything through the chatter. ‘In Bologna, a cross of fire hung in the skies all the day. In the sixth hour it fled across the heavens. It plunged into the sea. The water around it burned scarlet and gold.’