The Gallows Curse

  'I thought those boys were the sons of the women.'

  Luce snorted. 'They're somebody's sons all right. There's many a mother or father has sold their sons to work in here. But they don't belong to us, though some of the women in here are more mothers to them than their own have ever been.'

  Elena closed her eyes as a sudden pain slashed through her head. What had become of her own son? What had Gytha done with him? Was he really being cared for somewhere safe, or had she sold him? Would he end up in a place like this? For a moment she was almost glad she was here, as if that would be enough to appease heaven and spare her son from such a place. She wanted to believe that whatever happened to her meant it could not happen to him. But deep down she knew that wasn't true. A woman and her child could easily be slaughtered together — they often were — but she clung to the thought all the same: I'm doing this to protect him.

  Why do mortals think that suffering is a coin with which they can buy justice or salvation? We mandrakes learn wisdom from our fathers: life is a steal if you are a talented thief, and if you are not, then you may suffer all you please but it will buy you nothing but pain.

  Elena could not prevent her face from screwing up into an expression of disgust as she glanced once more at the pictures on the board. She looked at Luce, trying to imagine which of these things she did.

  Luce saw her expression and her face darkened. 'You needn't sneer at us. You're in here too, aren't you?'

  'But I couldn't do that!' Elena said.

  You'd be surprised at what you can do when you have to, and if you bend a little, kitten, you might even get to enjoy it.'

  Elena felt her face burning, knowing that Luce had realized exactly what she was thinking. But she still couldn't bring herself to imagine doing such things with strangers. She couldn't and she wouldn't. She was married in all but name. She wasn't like Luce. She would never be like Luce.

  But she wouldn't have to be. Raffaele would come soon, maybe he'd even come today, and take her somewhere safe. She wasn't staying here. She didn't live here, not like the other girls. Today or tomorrow Raffaele would come for her.

  Trying to avert her gaze from the mesmerizing pictures on the board, Elena threw herself into the cleaning and tidying, trying hard to focus on smoothing, straightening, tossing, turning, strewing, all those chores which back in Gastmere she had impatiently prayed to have done and over, but to which she now clung as fiercely as a beggar grasps his only coin.

  Luce saw her fearful expression ease and smiled to herself. She had seen enough bubs enter Ma's gates to know that all they needed was time. Let her get accustomed to it gradually, she thought. So she did not tell Elena that these plain rooms, these anonymous rooms, were just public rooms meant for the poorer classes: the penniless journeymen and the pimple- faced virgin apprentices; the sailors and peddlers who wanted ale, meat and a woman in that order; and the minor clerics whose long hours spent freezing their bollocks off through dreary Latin services gave rise to fantasies so ungodly that they dared not confess them to any but a whore. But there were other rooms, secret rooms, of which, as yet, Elena knew nothing, but she would learn. Oh yes, in time she would learn, as all mortals must, that every soul has its own dark and hidden chambers.

  7th Day after the New Moon,

  July 1211

  Vervain — an ancient magical herb, which the druids revere almost as much as mistletoe. Christians say it was used to staunch Christ's wounds on the Cross and therefore it is used to sprinkle holy water. It is said to avert evil, and stop bleeding. Nevertheless, witches and warlocks use it often in their spells as a love charm, and if a thief should make a cut on his hand and press the leaf to it, he shall have the power to open locks.

  If a mortal suffers from a tumour he should cut a vervain root in half and hang a portion round his neck whilst the other is dried over a fire. As the root withers in the heat, so shall the tumour wither away. But the mortal must make certain to keep the withered root safe, for if an enemy or malicious spirit wishes him harm, he may steal the root and drop it into water and as the root swells again so shall the tumour.

  Mortals believe that if they put vervain in the water they bathe in they shall have knowledge of the future and obtain their heart's desire.

  But know this, those who pluck the herb must do so only at certain phases of the moon. They must recite charms and must leave honeycomb in the place where they gathered it to make restitution for the violence done to the earth in taking such a sacred herb. Payment must always be made for everything wrested from the earth, for if it is not offered then it will be forcibly taken.

  The Mandrake's Herbal

  Little Finch

  Even before Raffe had taken a pace into Ma's chamber, his head was reeling from the soporific heat and the heavy scents of the musky oils Ma Margot rubbed into her glossy black hair. Although the sun was blazing down outside, the shutters on the window were, as always, tightly shut. The room was illuminated by thick candles impaled on spikes on the wall. Beneath the spikes dripping wax grew up on the floor and walls like layers of sallow fungus on a decaying tree, becoming fatter and more twisted with each passing day.

  A flagon of wine and two goblets were laid on the table along with trenchers of cold meats, roasted fowl, cheese and figs. Raffe guessed that Ma Margot had been warned of his coming even before he'd swung down from the saddle in her stable yard. With a flick of her beringed fingers, Ma indicated the empty chair and Raffe sank into it, facing her across the narrow table.

  Ma's chair was higher than Raffe's, with a set of wooden steps in front so that the tiny woman could climb up into it, though Raffe knew she always made a point of being seated before Talbot showed him into her presence.

  In truth chair was too humble a word for such a piece of furniture. Some might have called it a throne, for its back and arms were carved to resemble serpents, painted in yellow, black and with touches of gold. The protruding red tongues of the vipers were hinged on wire threads and they flickered up and down at the slightest movement of the chair's occupant. The eyes of the snakes were inlaid with chips of emerald glass. At least Raffe supposed they must be glass for surely not even Ma Margot could afford real emeralds. The green eyes of the serpents glinted in the trembling candlelight, so that their gaze seemed to be fastened upon the victim in the opposite chair, giving Raffe the uneasy impression that at any time they might dart forward and strike.

  Ma Margot pushed a flagon of wine towards him and Raffe poured the dark ruby liquid into his goblet.

  'You've come to see your little pigeon?'

  Raffe started violently, spilling a few drops of the wine, and Ma Margot's lips twitched in a smile.

  'Is she ... in good health?' Raffe said, avoiding the question.

  Ma shrugged. 'Had a touch of milk fever the first week, but she's over that now. Strong girl, but then these field girls usually are. She works hard enough, I'll give her that. No! Don't fret yourself,' Ma raised a stubby hand to forestall the question he was about to ask, 'she's only been put to cleaning and the like, no customers, not till we knew what you had planned for her.'

  Ma glanced slyly at him and, removing a long jewelled pin from her coiled black hair, began scraping at the dirt encrusted under her pointed nails.

  'Thing is, I can't keep the girl here indefinitely if all she's to do is cleaning. I've women aplenty who are past their prime and don't get so many customers now, so they'll gladly do a bit of cleaning rather than be thrown out on the streets. They've served me loyally over the years and I'll not see them put out for a newcomer. This girl of yours, she'll have to start bringing some money in, and more than pennies at that. I'm taking a huge risk, hiding a fugitive here when Osborn's got a fat bounty on her head.'

  Ma Margot pulled a wooden trencher towards her and stabbed her hairpin into the tiny carcass of a roasted songbird. She lifted it daintily to her lips. Her sharp teeth crunched through the bones as she devoured it whole.

  'If any of my customers should
recognize her . . .'

  'Why should they?' Raffe demanded. 'She's never been out of her village before and the villagers who come here to market can't afford your prices.'

  Ma smiled serenely at him and gestured at the food spread out between them. 'We give our customers what they want and they pay for it. There are plenty of cheap stews in Norwich where you can have a whore for the price of a beaker of ale, but you may end up with a few surprises you didn't pay for.'

  Raffe knew it was true; whatever else you could say about Ma Margot's, no man ever got his purse stolen as he lay sleeping, or woke up to find himself being sold as a slave to the pirates.

  Ma leaned back in her nest of serpents and regarded him shrewdly. 'So what will we do with her, Master Raffe? There's a number of customers have asked for her already, for she is quite striking with that red hair of hers. You know what some men say, flames on top mean there's a blazing fire below, and a few customers would pay good money to quench it for her.'

  Raffe was on his feet in an instant. 'Shut your filthy mouth!' His hand shot out to grab Ma's throat, but he'd forgotten about the long gold pin in her hand. He yelped as the point was rammed with unerring accuracy into his palm.

  'Manners, Master Raffe,' Ma said, watching with evident satisfaction as he sucked at the blood flowering in his hand. 'Here, sit down. Take more wine and some meats for your belly. All men act with too much haste when they're hungry.'

  Still smarting with rage and pain, Raffe reluctantly resumed his seat, and Ma waited as he ripped the meat savagely from a roasted duck and stuffed it into his mouth. He continued to eat in stony silence until, finally replete, he pushed the trencher away.

  'Now,' Ma said, 'let's talk business.'

  Her tone was so calm and matter of fact, Raffe might have believed he'd imagined the violent exchange, if his hand hadn't still been throbbing from the pin stab.

  You sent the girl here knowing what my business was, so you must have had your reasons, Master Raffe. For if her safety was all that concerned you, she'd be in Flanders by now, but that would have put her right out of your reach, wouldn't it?'

  'That's not true. I thought of nothing else but her safety. That was precisely why I didn't attempt to send her abroad. We might have had to wait for days to find a ship that would take her from these shores, and Osborn would have had a watch put on the harbours within hours.'

  Ma threw back her head and cackled with laughter. 'Don't try to cod me. We both know Talbot could smuggle a whole whorehouse of girls on board a ship if you paid him to.'

  Raffe's face flushed with anger. 'How is the villein who's never been further than the manor's field supposed to fend for herself in a foreign land? She'd have died a beggar on the streets in a month, or worse.'

  'Milking a cow or tending a field is the same the world over. We both know she'd have found work easily enough, so don't let's waste words.' Ma was no longer smiling and her eyes had taken on a glittering hardness.

  'You want her here within your grasp. But if she stays here, she must earn her keep. I can fill Elena's bed a dozen times over with girls who'll gladly do whatever I ask for a roof over their heads and a full belly.'

  'You owe me,' Raffe snapped. 'If it wasn't for me, your brother would have hanged in the Holy Land and you'd never have come to know him. I swore to you I'd never tell him who you were and I kept my word so far, because we both know that if Talbot ever found out you and he were kin, he'd start thinking he was master here. He'd want a share of the profits, and a great deal more than a share.'

  Ma smiled, though her eyes remained cold and hard. 'I won't deny the old ape is useful. But you and I both know I've more than repaid that debt to you these past twenty years. A life for a life I've given you and I owe you nothing more. So if your girl can't turn a good profit for me, she's out.'

  Ma leaned forward and plucked a fig from the trencher, but her gaze was fixed unblinkingly on Raffe's as if she wanted to make sure he understood every word she was about to say.

  'Our parents died when I was still a babe in arms. Talbot was almost ten years old then, and, as he's told you, my father had already given him to a ship's captain in payment for a debt. My uncle and his wife took me in, thinking to make use of me as a servant as soon as I could lift a broom. But when they saw I'd never grow like other women, they sold me to the first man that would pay a fat purse to bed a freak. Some men are like that, you know, want to try one of every kind of woman there is, just like some men faced with a banquet won't rest till they've sampled every dish. The more exotic and bizarre, the better it suits their tastes — dwarfs like me, women without arms or legs, giants, Jewesses, Moors, albinos. Some men think if a woman looks different, she'll taste different between his thighs.'

  Ma clenched her fist so tightly that the juice from the fig in her hand ran down her arm. 'I was lucky, if you can call it that — the man who bought me had money, and so did his friends. I wasn't a fool. I saw I'd got two choices: resist them and know that they'd rape me anyway, or go willingly with a smile on my face and screw every penny I could from them by giving them all they wanted and things they hadn't even dreamt of.

  'Ever since I was twelve years old, I've survived and grown rich by giving men what they desire, even if they haven't got the guts to admit what they want to their own confessors. I learned to know men better than they know themselves, so believe me when I say, a man doesn't put his prize chicken into a den of foxes unless he thinks that hen is really a fox. So whether you know it or not, Master Raffe, you brought this girl here to a whorehouse because that's what you believe her to be.'

  Raffe leaned forward on to the table, his head in his hands, trying to master the feelings raging through him. He felt as if he was trapped between two charging armies. Every instinct in him wanted to keep Elena safe, pure, unsullied, just as she had been that day he bound her to him over the body of Gerard.

  Yet she had betrayed him with Athan. He could imagine every detail of it. He had done so many times, some furtive sweaty groping in a stinking byre or stable. And if she spread her legs for that gormless youth, who's to say there hadn't been others? Even that, he persuaded himself, he could have forgiven her, if she had only trusted him. Why couldn't she have brought the baby to him if she wanted to be rid of it? He had offered her, stupid little girl, a base-born villein, his love and protection and she wouldn't even condescend to take that much from him.

  He knew he only had to toss Ma a few coins and Elena would be his to do with as he pleased, for as long as he pleased. That was all the old hag wanted - money. But even now, even after all he'd risked for Elena, he couldn't do it. He couldn't bear to see her mouth curl in disgust when she saw him naked, the ridicule in her eyes, the mockery pouring from those full lips. He could not force himself on her, knowing how much she would hate him for it.

  A smile of satisfaction hovered around Ma's mouth. She pushed the wine flagon invitingly towards him. 'Now, Master Raffe, let me tell you what I have in mind for the girl.'

  Few gentlemen came to Ma's house in the early afternoon, for most were seeing to their own businesses. The women took advantage of the quiet time to sleep, wash and mend their linen, or primp in readiness for the early evening customers. But Elena, once her cleaning tasks were done, always spent the afternoon in the courtyard garden. Mostly she just wandered among the vervain and germander, lavender and bergamot, letting her skirts brush the bushes to release the scents. Often she would pull a weed or clip off a dying bloom to encourage more to blossom. It wasn't part of her duties, but she missed the fields and the forests of her village in a way she had never dreamed possible.

  When she had been a field hand, back before that day when Master Raffaele had summoned her from threshing, she'd done her fair share of complaining about the back- breaking work of hoeing and planting, reaping and gathering. But she had not understood until now how much freedom she'd had to stop and stare up at the wide open skies, the ships of white clouds drifting through the blue sea above and the ra
gged flocks of rooks wheeling around the swaying trees. In all directions the land had rolled out away from her, shaded with every hue of brown and green growing paler and paler in the far distance until finally the colours dissolved into the ocean of sky. But in here she could see no further than the high walls of the courtyard and the square of blue cut out above her head, like a piece of cloth laid ready to be crimped and sewn and bound.

  Back in Gastmere, she had been able to escape on solitary walks to pick blackberries or gather firewood, and find the space to be silent, listening to the piping of a blackbird or the wind creeping through the rushes. But here she was surrounded by women day and night, chattering, laughing, snoring. For all that she missed the land, there was one thing she longed for more than any of that. It was Athan. It was those precious moments when they'd walked hand in hand under the great dome of glittering stars, when there seemed no one else in the whole world save the two of them. Who was he walking under the stars with now? Tears pricked her eyes. Why hadn't Athan tried to find her? Did he even care what had happened to her?