Kathryn Le Veque (26 page)

CHAPTER 2

The day is almost upon us, the houses and trees silhouetted by a
faint blue light in the east. The burned croft is a smoking wreck, embers
steaming in the dawn.

The wind dies now. In this winter, we have had several unfortunate
fires, but this is the worst yet. The crowd slows its frantic work, as the
danger fades.

Now I can hear them: the cries of children, the sobs of babes in
arms. No doubt those cries were all around me for hours in the crowd. Yet I had
ears only for one cry, and that cry never came.

The bodies are surrounded by their families. These youth were our
bleak earth’s brightest, our highest roll on Fortune’s wheel.

I go to the dead. They are blackened and unrecognizable, each boy
stretched out like a penitent against the raw earth.
These are other
children, not mine, not mine.

But I reach out my
hand,
I cross them
with the holy sign. My mouth moves silently in the rhythm of that last rite,
although I have not a whit of faith left in me.

If I still believed in such fictions, the souls of these innocents
would be trapped in limbo for eternity.
A cold God to condemn
children to such punishment.
And
my
blessing means nothing: we
have no priest in this village, no sacrament of burial, no sacraments at all.

The world blurs as my eyes go wet.

A voice calls my name loud.
“
Mear
!”
I turn, blind and terrified,
cov
-
ering
my tear-streaked face. Liam’s voice is strained and hoarse.
“
Mear
.
Ah,
Mear
, there is
no shame in tears. All of us have lost.”

Liam is the poorest man in the village, and we have lived side by
side so long that I have wondered if he and his wife Kate see through my soot-
stained skin to the woman underneath. I stay apart from him as much as I can,
but always he talks to me, despite my silence.

Most of the villagers act as if I am of no more importance than a
beast. No one here ever pays me mind. There are few who know I am alive. I
prefer it that way, for I want to be invisible.

Yet I would have taken my child and left long ago except for this
man, Liam, and my friends
Salvius
and Nell.
Salvius
needs me at his bellows and his smithy—he values my
labor and my friendship. And Liam at least helps me laugh.

But Nell—poor Nell—she is gone.

Now Liam puts an arm around my slight shoulders, holding me as I
sob. There is no laughter in him after last night. His green eyes are full of
water, and his red beard trembles.

“Oh,
Mear
, thank
you for
blessin
’ their souls.”

Who else has seen me bless and cross the
dead?

But Liam does not care that I make the sign reserved for priests
and nuns. He mourns over his son, and then he turns to look at another body,
close at hand.

“I think here’s your lad. Seems to me it has to be him. He was the
last one I brought out—the tallest and the furthest from the door.”

And when he says this, I cannot pretend any longer, I cannot wish
away this hard truth. The silver chain glimmers faintly in the dawn light—it
does not lie. I fall to my knees. Here is my beloved, my son.

Liam bends down to his own firstborn son, burned and blackened on
the ground. A groan comes out of the stricken father, an anguished sound to
shake the earth.

Now the crowd swells and crests under the whip of a mad grief.

Tom is slavering out some half-remembered tale, a demonic vision.
“This is the work of those who killed the Christ. They are cursed— infested
with the devil’s seed! They drink children’s blood in the night!”

Everyone knows this is the third terrible fire we have had this
winter. This time, it was Benedict’s weaving house that
burned,
and some in the crowd move toward his family.

“Why were the lads here?” cries Geoff, the carpenter. “Why were
they burned?”

“I didn’t do it!” Benedict’s voice is strained with fear. “They
gathered at Vespers, I tell you the truth. They were only here to work on the
grand tunics for Sir Peter of Lincoln.”

“Where were
you
then?” shouts Liam, choking back a sob.
“It’s your house!”

“I was with my wife!” Benedict sweeps his hat from his weathered
scalp and throws it on the ground. “I took Sophia ’cross the valley to see to
Phoebe’s birth.”

The men stink of rage, like a pan of smoking oil before it catches
fire.

“You’re a liar!” says Geoff to
Bene
,
pushing toward him through the crowd.

“Goddammit, I lost my son too,” Benedict shouts. “I wasn’t even
here!”

Hob, the alderman, affirms that Benedict returned late, at
Nocturns
hour.

Most times the crowd will listen to Hob, but today they will not
be stilled. Women scream at Benedict and his family, wanting his blood in
payment. Small Geoff rushes at Benedict, to hurt him.

But Geoff can’t get through the crowd drawn tight around Tom, who
bawls out the sordid details of his imagined witchcraft.
The
Star Cham-
ber
, the White Tower, evil stories of Old
Gods and black fairies.
And that ancient villain, the
Jew.

“Every child knows who does dark deeds in the night,” shrieks Tom.
“Every child knows we suffer now in this world because of that crime against
our Lord Jesus Christ. Jews did this!”

Ripe nonsense.
But the villagers want so desperately to believe there is a
reason for this loss.

Tom tells them that there is a root out of which murder grows, a
seed that can be plucked. The fires come most likely from an old chimney
catching, or a load of hay that catches spontaneously. Yet no one has died from
the previous fires. This time, the villagers want a cause, a goat to tie the
blood to, an empty vessel to fill with hatred and bludgeon with their loss.

“The Jews!” calls Tom again.



There are a few of Jewish blood here—I know who they are, even
now, years after they converted.
How long will it take the crowd to remember
and find those who once were Jews in this village?

“Damn the Jews to hell!” someone in the crowd shouts. “Make the
Jews pay!”

No one notices when I rise from the ground and stagger to the
smok
-
ing
ruin. My mute questions
will find no answers in gruesome children’s tales. I know what will tell me the
truth— the bare reality of the boys’ deaths. I push through the crowd to the
place they died.

What power held the door so the boys could
not flee the rising flames?

With my foot, I stir the warm cinders. The door broken by
Salvius
lies in pieces, smashed flat. But there is a knot
here, an unlikely twist of the rope that I must examine.

I can see now that this was the rope that held the door tight
closed. I pick at it, pull out pieces of a rope still stretched taut across the
door- frame. I have seen this curious binding once before. But no
fairie
tied this knot. No errant ghostly Jew. It is a
triple knot, tied fast across a half hitch. It crumbles to ash under my probing
touch.

“Trial by water,” wails Tom.
“Trial by fire.
Kill the traitor Jews, save the innocent!”

Liam taunts Benedict. “Don’t you know a Jew? Did you burn the
place for her,
Bene
?”

“We are all of us the traitors to our children! Every man in this
vil
-
lage
,” cries Benedict.
“Every man stands accused,
every one
should suffer
trial by water,
I
tell you.
Every
one of us!”

“Who do we drown first?” Liam’s face is stained with tears.

“Hell, I know you did it,” screams Geoff at Benedict. “You killed
them. Drown yourself in the pond first!”

The people surge back and forth, panicked.
My
heart thrums, fear shrinking my bowels, quivering through my pulse.

The quarreling men bring back to me the chaos of my dying home
village many years ago, when I made that last promise to my mother. I can
picture the hands moving from gestures to fists, from sticks to sharp sickles.
Quick as a breath.

“That’s enough!” Hob’s deep and lordly voice finally stills the
milling crowd. “The blood of these innocents cries out, as our brother Tom
tells us. Their souls plead for vengeance! I agree. But I tell you, drowning—or
near drowning—half the men of this village
won’t bring our children back to us.”

The crowd murmurs affirmation.

“What will bring them back is justice!” shouts Hob. “And there’s
one seat of justice here on earth.”

“Kill them Jews,” mutters Tom again. “Kill ’em now.” But the crowd
ignores him this time.

Hob cries out louder. “We will take the proof to our King!”

“To the King,” echoes
Salvius
. His
masterful tone is a herald’s cry that cuts through the chaos.
Salvius
leaps onto Benedict’s cart that stands near at hand
and finds a common cause with the crowd. “Come, my friends, we will seek the
King’s justice!”

Some in the crowd move at this—the men who shouted loud against
the Jews now lift the lifeless bodies from the ground.

Benedict and the orphan, Cole, load the body of Benedict’s son
onto the cart. The boy’s corpse lands with a sodden
thunk
.

Geoff pushes past me, muttering. “If I cannot kill a Jew here, at
least I will go with my son, Goddamn them, and tell the king what I think of
his
damn’d
protection against Jews, much good it did
us.”

Liam lifts his own son’s cold body. He places him gently on the
straw in the cart. “I’ll go with you, my boy,” he says to his son, and shakes
with weeping.

The wind blows a hard gust. There is a simmering argument in the
crowd. When the harvest failed and the belts tightened in this starving season
of ours, most were left too weak to search for food outside the
vil
-
lage
.
How can any of us
take a journey now?

My friend
Salvius
waves away the
questions. “Yes, yes, we’ve got enough food, and we’re taking strong men only.
We’ll make it all the way to London, by God’s bloody Son!”

As the light bleeds into the sky, the feeling of the crowd shifts
with it. The hunger for this journey jumps back and forth between the
villagers, like the heat of a flame passing between them.

Geoff protests, his voice a thin reed of reason. “We should take
them to somewhere close-at-hand. The Abbot at the Cluny Monastery—it is close
on the King’s road.”

Salvius
skillfully whips them all forward, turning them all toward a
journey as a great beast is turned with a small prod.

“The Jews!” the crowd cries. “We seek justice against the Jews—and
we will take this proof of their crime all the way to the King. The Throne will
judge the Jews!”

The men bellow loud, they swear on their children’s unburied bod-
ies
, they will go and find the truth. Hob and Benedict
shout themselves hoarse, promising justice to their clans. I turn away—I cannot
keep up with the arguments that shudder from the crowd. None of their moans and
barks is worth a spit in the wind.

I look at my son, and I sink into grief. When they come to get the
body with the necklace, I do not let go. I close my
eyes,
I can hear them all around, their voices a cacophony.

“Why do you hold on, old
Mear
?”


“Let the body go.”


“He is the father.”


“Show him pity.
He
canna speak.”


Tears leak out of my tight-shut eyes.
I want my boy.
My
soul is tied to

his
sweet
body, the one stretched out as a tortured savior. I can feel his burning
through my
flesh,
the choking smoke is in my own
lungs. I will burn with him.

But however much I wish
it,
I cannot take
myself out of existence. I open my eyes once more. My body still
breathes,
my heart pounds
igno
-
rantly
in my bosom.

I will not let him depart from me. I will
heal him
, I think desperately.
I will care for
his wounded body until he is well again.

The men lift his body onto the cart.

They are taking him away. There will be nothing left to me. Not a
body, not a token, not a grave.

I lift my face, stained with ash and tears. A baying sob breaks
from my throat.