by Clio Gray
It was not ludicrous in the slightest to Louisa’s companions, who were avid readers of the penny dreadfuls that went the rounds; a handsome, unattached young foreigner shipwrecked and his guardian murdered…what could be more romantic?
Louisa was losing patience. She’d hadn’t even got to the best of her news, the part about Caro, and realised that even if she did it was going to seem an anti-climax to these women. She looked about her, at doughy, bossy Theresa who was so fat she had difficulty moving from one chair to the next, at little Lisbet sat next to her, the human incarnation of a mouse – if ever God would allow such a thing. Suddenly she loathed them all, loathed their gossiping and tattling that could never be of any consequence.
She would never come back to the Sewing Circle again. She had Caro and that was all that mattered. Let them think what they liked. If they chose to chase after Ruan Peat, well, they were welcome, would soon learn what she already knew about how self-centred and opinionated he was. But she’d read the same penny dreadfuls the rest of them had done and decided to go out with a bang. They wanted a story and she would give them one, one they would swallow down like cormorants do sand eels.
‘It’s a tale and a half,’ Louisa started, tacking together in her head all the little snippets Hendrik and Ruan had spoken of these last few weeks at table, ‘all beginning a couple of hundred years ago with a secret society called The Lynx. It involves murder – not just of Ruan’s guardian, whose name, by the way is Golo Eck, the same Ecks who originated here – and the unnatural love that can sometime arise between men of a certain disposition. This Golo Eck had been about to start the Lynx up again and Hendrik and Ruan Peat – once he’s inherited the Eck estate and all that goes with it – mean to do the same…’
A bit of a lie on that front, but by now Louisa was off, talking for a straight eleven minutes without interruption, telling all she knew about what her husband had uncovered about the Lynx after Ruan handed over Caro’s copy of Behemoths, and other Wonders of the Deep. And it was good stuff: a father’s condemnation of his son for starting up a scientific society against the express wishes of the father’s Church, a disinheritance in the making, the murdering of a pharmacist by the Eck ancestor, the way the Lynx had managed to get him freed from prison by a cardinal’s intervention, the persistent rumours of unnatural relationships between the society’s members, their prolonged connection to Galileo, especially once he’d come under investigation by the Vatican and condemned as a heretic…
It was lurid stuff, Louisa threading it altogether like the competent seamstress she was, her companions enthralled. She even managed to bring in Golo’s intent of rescuing the part of the Lynx library that was in France.
‘And we all know what the French are up to,’ she said darkly, for of course they all did, it being common knowledge that the Revolutionaries were godless and without rule, chopping off heads with the same abandon these women chopped up herbs to put into their pots. Common knowledge too that the French were hovering on the hinterlands of Holland’s borders with the aim of making its citizens as godless as they were themselves. Not that anyone in Deventer, let alone in Louisa’s Sewing Circle, had noticed any substantial change to their daily lives because of these incursions. However they were uncomfortably aware that the Francophiles among them were already declaring themselves citizens of Batavia, as the French had decided their country should be called, and that this invading army of heretics might come marching through their streets at any moment.
It was an exit anyone would have been proud of and Louisa Grimalkin chose that moment to go.
‘Oh, but sisters,’ she said, standing up suddenly, a smile on her face like a cut of Edam cheese. ‘I’m going to have to leave it at that. I almost forgot to tell you in all the excitement, that I now have my own ward to look after. Young Caro, our second lodger, and a better lad you’ve never met.’
And with that parting shot Louisa went down the stairs and left her Sewing Circle for the very last time, immensely pleased with herself, quite unaware that the words of her story were about to embark out into the world alone, their whispers and echoes seeping away from their source like water from a leaky well.
If only she’d understood the consequences, if only she’d realised how freely those words would soon be winding and wending their way through the streets of Deventer, reaching out to ears that were never meant to hear them – from wife to husband, from husband to apprentice, from apprentice to the foreign Guildsmen who congregated in the tavern of the Golden Globe, Louisa would have taken up her needles and threads and sewn her lips tight as a cockle, keeping itself safe from the storm that was about to come.
25
FEVERS, AND BAD OLD MEN
Greta Finnerty took herself away from Vinegar Hill quick as she could. She had a welter of bruises down both arms and thighs from her rolling, and her feet were in a bloody mess from tramping up from Rosslare. She’d no idea of the true extent of the losses brought on by the battle, nor what the English would do now that they had the Irish routed, blood-lust leaking from every pore. All she knew was that she had to do as Mogue had directed, and get away as fast as she could.
She listened at every wall and door she passed, eavesdropped outside taverns and farmyards without daring to approach any of them directly. This was not the time to be finding out the hard way who was a friend of the cause and who was not. Hard times could make a traitor of anyone desperate enough and there were reports of betrayals and subsequent arrests around every corner.
She did learn that every port in the south was being watched, every village harbour – no matter how small – now manned by English guards and no way through the cordon they’d cast about the coast, drawn tighter with every day like a salmon net whose holes got smaller with every pull. No way onto a boat then, not this far south, so not the usual routes to the Road to Exile, and no point either in hoping that Peter could help her for she still didn’t know what had happened to him. There was one way further north she knew she could go, and she had no other choice.
A girl dressed as a boy, one with bad feet, left to travel her road alone, she feared at every crossroads, every turn, every path she took, every village boundary stone she passed, terrified she’d be recognised for her past services for what she was: a messenger for the United Irish who had lost her purpose, there being hardly any Irish United left.
She slept below hedges, in the lea-side of barns and hayricks, curled up against the boles of trees, waking in a fright at every sound, every snuffle of the foxes who smelt on her something of their own – blood and decay – coming far closer therefore than they would otherwise have done. Her dreams through those nights were dreadful and recurring: terrifying tableaux of the battle on Vinegar Hill, of Mogue Kearns’ grip around her ankle dragging her down, pulling her slowly but inexorably below the surface of the earth, her mouth clogging up and gagging on the gore-soaked mud as she went.
She tore her shirt into strips and wrapped them about her feet, slicing her ill-fitting boots’ uppers open with her knife to accommodate the bandages. Despite these rudimentary measures to alleviate her pain, the walking went harder than she’d ever thought possible. She hobbled along like a cripple, hands gripping two sticks of blackthorn she’d hacked from a hedge. She pulled up potatoes from their fields, gnawing at them as she travelled, plucking the dark green heads of fat-hen, taking freely of the wild raspberries that had fruited early.
She passed into Moone at the end of June, just over the border of County Clare, her body so tired that every time she stopped, or leant her back against a boulder or tree trunk, she almost instantly went to sleep. She woke only when her body slid to the ground with a thud that jolted her right back into waking, hardly able to remember where she was or how she’d got there. It wasn’t long before the overriding loneliness and the impossibility of the task Mogue had set her became so overwhelming that sobs broke involuntarily from her throat and her feet started up their insistent throbbing in recognition of her
despair.
Harder and harder became the necessary job of clutching at her blackthorn staffs to propel her on. One particular night she sat down against the bole of a tree and decided enough was enough. No more walking or hiding for Greta Finnerty. No more clinging to her oath when plainly it couldn’t be fulfilled. Even if she managed to reach the safe house and over the water, it was all going to come to nothing. All she’d heard on her travels was of defeat, of the United Irish finished, Vinegar Hill the last nail in the coffin.
Enough for Greta Finnerty. Her struggle was over. Peter was most probably dead, as were Mogue Kearns and the others from the Hill. She’d no business living anyway, not now the rest were gone. She closed her eyes. Time to lay herself down to sleep and if she never woke up again, well, that was alright with her.
George Gwilt was a happy man. He woke before dawn, opened his door and straightway smelt the new wetness of the dust, saw the droplets clinging to the long meadow grass and the leaves of the vegetables in his plot. The previous night’s rain had cleansed the air, taken away the stink of the pigs he and his sons had helped bring in from the scrub woods the day before, now corralled in a couple of fields that had been early harvested of corn, to snout and snuffle their way through the gleanings, churn up the soil, make it that much easier to pile on the rotting seaweed they’d gathered after the storm, harrow and plough once the time came right.
Because it was a Sunday, George was up earlier than usual, gratified to find no one else yet abroad. A single robin began to trill from an outgrowing tip of the quick-thorn hedges laid about the pig paddock. He saw the flash and flitter of a flock of goldfinch dipping in and out between the feet of the somnolent pigs and settle on the teasles. He made his way towards the sea and began walking the stretch of the bay towards the Servants, where he would take early morning mass.
His life had changed since the wrecking of the Collybuckie. Previously, he’d never spent a moment at the Servants, nor inside a church or chapel if he could help it, but now he grasped every opportunity to be there. And all because of the two gold cufflinks Ruan had shoved his way. Plus Brother Joachim had approached the shipping company at Vlissingen and had managed to squeeze out a small reward for the men who’d been responsible for rescuing the survivors of the Collybuckie who would otherwise have drowned, even if they were in sight of shore. How Brother Joachim had achieved this latter George didn’t know, but it was to George that Joachim brought the news.
It had become their habit after Golo Eck to meet up every few days at the small wayside chapel dedicated to Saint Drostan, a small erection of timbers covering the spring flowing out of the earth as if from nowhere, bubbling from the ground and gathering instantly into a shallow pool before winding its way down to the sea. They’d sit on the benches there and talk about their days, the business of the village, what was going on at the Servants, and it was there that Joachim had met him several weeks previously.
‘Ah, George! Just the person I was hoping to meet…’
As if anyone else would be sitting there a half hour after dawn. George smiled.
‘Hello, Brother. Anything new?’
‘Well,’ Joachim said, returning George’s smile. ‘Quite a lot, as it happens. We had a visitor arrive late afternoon yesterday, come from Vlissingen.’
George frowned. This could hardly be considered momentous news, travellers arriving at the Servants all the time. Joachim interpreted his confusion and tipped his head slightly.
‘He came direct from the shipping company that owned the Collybuckie.’
George shivered. It still brought a chill to him, that push and poke of his rake and what it had found.
‘And he brought something with him,’ Joachim went on, ‘that I am now going to give to you.’
He produced a small bag and laid it down on George’s bench, George hearing the unmistakable clink of coins and looking over sharply at Joachim.
‘But what’s this, Brother?’ he asked, perplexed.
Joachim laughed.
‘It’s for you, my friend, for you and your village. Didn’t you tell me a while back that your barn’s roof blew away in that storm?’
George nodded. It was no secret. The Collybuckie had not been the only thing wrecked in that storm. It had been a terrible source of worry that they wouldn’t be able to fix the barn before the harvest was in, for that communal barn was all they had to protect their stores over winter. Ruan’s cufflinks had been sold but hardly raised enough, tiny as they were. The roof had taken all the top timbers with it and the whole structure needed pulling down and rebuilding.
‘Well then,’ Joachim said. ‘Here’s the answer to your problem. You saved them, and now they are saving you. What could be more fitting?’
George clenched his jaw as his throat spasmed. He thought for an awful moment that he was going to cry. Brother Joachim saw it, and laid a gentle hand on George’s shoulder.
‘It’s only right,’ he said quietly. ‘Those men would have died if it hadn’t been for you and yours.’
And that was how it all started, George progressively passing off his duties to the village to his more than capable sons, spending more and more time at the Servants. At George’s request, Joachim began to teach him about the laying out of the dead, how to tend the sick and dying, how to treat the diseases that plagued the Peninsula that was riven with swamps and mires and the filthy black mud that oozed great clouds of biting, stinging insects every summer.
Joachim, and now George, greatly relied in this respect on an ancient pamphlet entitled On the Plague, and why it has particularly spread through the Low Countries, and how to treat it. The author was one Johannes Heckius of Deventer, who styled himself on the title page as a Lincean Knight. Who or what a Lincaen Knight was neither knew, but the fact remained that the advice the author gave for the treatment of fevers was both appropriate and efficacious, and Joachim had come across nothing better. The advised medications might have been devised a couple of centuries before but if they worked, they worked. Ruan Peat was direct proof of that.
Greta did not die that night. She awoke with a start to find she was not alone, an old man sitting a few feet away from her, a small fire blazing between them within a ring of stones. Greta blinked, swallowed, scrabbled backwards against the tree trunk, her hands going for her knife only to find that her backpack had dropped from her shoulders and fallen like a noose about waist and wrists.
‘Some emptiness in that stomach of yours,’ the old man said, unperturbed by her evident panic. ‘Heard it almost ten yards distant, grumbling like a fog horn, so it was.’
Greta said nothing. She was trapped. She moved slowly and carefully, trying to ease the backpack up so she could move more freely.
‘No need to fret, lad,’ the old man said, poking away at the small fire with his stick. ‘Not dawn yet. Plenty of time to leave, and no one coming anyway.’
Greta’s heart was thudding. She switched her eyes from left to right looking for possible danger points, saw only the grass of the unkempt field, grey in the gloom, spreading away a hundred yards and more towards the river’s edge. She saw the silhouettes of forty, maybe fifty sheep, slumped upon its banks, huddling into one another, heads upon each other’s flanks as they slept, the night still warm. Beyond them the river’s water gurgling gently over its stones, the white wings of moths hovering in small disparate clouds from off its banks.
‘Want a slurpy?’ the old man by the fire was saying, holding out a beaker towards Greta who took it without thinking, started drinking greedily before choking, spitting out what was still in her mouth, green and purple flames jumping where the liquid hit the fire, the old man laughing softly into the dawn.
‘That’s poteen, lad,’ he said, ‘water of life, so they say, so don’t be wasting it. Sip it gentle, sip it right, and it’ll give you the best sleep you’ve ever had and Lord knows, you looks like you could use it.’
Greta was angry, on the verge of tears, couldn’t take the old man’s laugh
ter, and tried to stand. Her legs gave way and down she went again, and the old man looked at her a moment, then shoved another cup towards Greta.
‘S’only water,’ the old man said, no laughter this time. Shamefaced in fact, for it had been a mean trick he’d played with the poteen and he knew it.
‘Take it,’ he said again. ‘Take it from one who’s already pissed a river away and knows its worth. Good enough for sheep, good enough for the likes of you and me.’
Greta took the beaker, sniffing first, sipping second and sure enough, just plain water this time, sweet with the taint of peat and all the more slaking because of it. The old man in the meantime raked at the ashes of his fire and drew out three charcoal-skinned potatoes, pushing them expertly onto a flat piece of bark with his stick and handing them to Greta, along with a knob of rancid-looking butter and a little pile of salt.
Greta was so hungry she took the trencher and broke open the hot tatties with her fingers, feeling the burn of their heat upon her skin without caring. She hadn’t died. She was alive, and she needed to eat and did so, dipping each blackened piece of hot potato into the stale butter and salt, swallowing eagerly, sucking quickly at the water to cool the heat of them in her mouth and stomach.
‘Don’t mind me saying this,’ the old man commented, once Greta had eaten and drunk her fill, ‘but you was saying a coupla things in your sleep back then.’
Greta stiffened, fumbling once more for her knife and felt its hilt, wondering whether – if the worst came to the worst – she could really do another man to death in a situation like this, in a field with the river running at its feet and the muffled coughs of the sheep sleeping on its banks. Back on the blood-and-gut splattered slopes of Vinegar Hill she could have massacred an entire army, the roar of the fight swallowing her in its sea, directing her with its tides, her blood on fire. But maybe not here, in the early morning calm, not unless the man gave her provocation. He looked past the age of pounce and pin, dip and thrust, but you never knew, so although she leaned back against her tree she was on guard, ready to strike if struck at.
