The Innocent (24 page)

Anne knew time was running out for Aveline; those who didn’t understand how Piers had come to die were howling for blood. A man might kill his wife and be acquitted by the courts since she was his property. A murdering wife, however, could be convicted of treason, for which the penalty was death.

The last day or two, crowds of men had gathered outside the main portico of Blessing House calling for Aveline to be burned on Newgate Hill as an example to all wives.

The process of justice was moving slowly, however. Refusing to be hurried by the mob, John Lambert, who maintained the king’s peace in London, along with his fellow aldermen in the city, had been to see Mathew and then had interviewed Aveline. He’d tried, quite gently, to get the girl to talk about the night Piers died, but the only response he’d had was silence or prayers to Jesus to have mercy on a poor sinner. Now his patience, officially, must be wearing out, and Anne knew he’d be back later today and this time he’d most likely take Aveline to face the king’s bench and, probably, death.

The day became more and more oppressive, the sky a dead leaden gray. In the pleasaunce the trees drooped, unaccustomed to day after day of heat, but the river passed by jauntily as ever and the cries of the rivermen saluting the girls in the garden were a happy change to the tension indoors.

Anne encouraged Aveline to sit beside her on one of the marble benches so that she could inspect the wound on her face without seeming to do it deliberately. It was too late to do very much but Anne wanted one last try. She’d made another ointment of Deborah’s, one that was used to bind wounds together in the forest where she’d lived as a child. It stank and was sticky—being made with borage, comfrey, fermented garlic, and salt—but it did clear infection. How to get Aveline to accept her help was the issue here. Anne picked up one of Aveline’s hands. “Are you thirsty, Aveline?”

Aveline was staring at her feet as if something about the pointed toes of her velvet slippers displeased her, but she said nothing.

“Can you hear me, Aveline?” No response. Anne leaned closer. She could see pus in the proud flesh on each side of Aveline’s wound. If the ointment was to work effectively, she’d have to clean it somehow.

“Do…you…want…some…water?”

Aveline turned and looked her directly in the eyes. “You don’t have to shout. I can hear you.”

Anne jumped. Aveline’s tone was normal.

“Thank you, sweet Jesu…” murmured Anne. “I’ve been so afraid for you…so afraid that—”

“Afraid I’d gone mad?” Harsh laughter from the other girl. “No. I’m not mad.” She frowned. “I’ve been thinking and…asking for help, though I don’t deserve it.”

“Of course you do—we all want to help you…”

Aveline gently patted Anne’s hand and then linked her own fingers together, twisting them in her lap.

“Sweet child. I’ve been most unkind to you.” She shook her head as Anne protested. “Let me speak truthfully. There are things I must say and things I must ask while I still have the time. Do they bury him today?”

Anne nodded, fearful of interrupting the flow.

“About time in this weather.” Again, the dreadful giggle. Then the laughter turned to coughing, a paroxysm that convulsed Aveline’s whole frail body. “You must know I stabbed him, Anne, but look, he cut me first.” And she turned her face toward the other girl. “He did this to me and for the first time I found the strength I needed. Our Lord gave it to me. He told me, in His Mother’s chapel at my churching. He said I was His handmaid and that He would show me very soon when I could best do Him service. You must believe me. Our Savior told me that I was to be the instrument of Piers’s salvation—unworthy though I am. Therefore, how could what I did be wrong?”

Anne was silent. Aveline’s tone was completely rational, but she was doomed by her own words. Soon John Lambert would come and Anne would have to tell him, if he asked her, what Aveline had said, and that would be a terrible burden to carry: she would be the one to condemn this poor tormented woman.

To gain thinking time, Anne changed the subject: “Aveline, will you let me look at your face? I think I can clean the pus out and help it heal.”

Aveline smiled at Anne. “Do not waste pity on me, child. What I did was God’s will and I am in His care. And it’s fitting I should bear the mark of my husband’s blade; after all, he bears enough from mine…” Then, suddenly, Aveline was on her feet and running through the garden down to the river before Anne could stop her.

At the end of the garden there were steps down to the bottom of a wall with a water gate, beyond which barges and wherries could be moored. The wall had great, black iron spikes along the top, and as Aveline ran to the top of the steps, Anne saw what she would do.

“Noooooo!” she screamed as she ran, but she was not fast enough.

There was a hot dazzle of brilliant red from Aveline’s underskirt as Piers’s widow hurled herself, down and down onto the spikes that lay along the ridge of the wall below.

Effortlessly, those metal spears pierced that fragile body and passed through Aveline’s heart. One terrible scream was all Anne heard and then she saw what lay below. All that was left of Aveline was a pitiful bundle of bloodstained cloth flapping gently in the slight breeze from the river. Anne fell to her knees and was violently sick into the expensive double-white roses planted in a border above the river steps. Then everything spun to black.

Chapter Sixteen

It was only for a moment that Anne lost consciousness. Soon she felt herself lifted up and opened her eyes as she was carried away from the top of the steps, away from the dreadful sight of the blood and Aveline’s fragile corpse.

It was Perkin Wye who had found her. He’d been on his way down to the storerooms under the house to personally count the sacks of stored grain recently purchased for the stables; he wanted no

“misunderstanding” about the tally this time. Preoccupied, he’d glanced over toward the pleasaunce and seen Anne lying on the flags above the steps, and had hurried over to find out what was wrong.

Melly, Edward’s nursemaid, arrived a moment or so after Perkin and had screamed to see him carrying Anne, apparently lifeless, up from the river. Then she’d seen Aveline hanging on the spikes and, yelling loudly for help, she’d run back to the house.

Alerted by Melly, Mathew Cuttifer and John Lambert hurried out into the blazing light.

“Enough!” barked Mathew. “All of you, back to your work. Now.” His voice had the crack of a whip and the desired effect: the members of the household who’d come to look after all the screaming scuttled to the safety of the house.

By this time, Perkin had deposited Anne on one of the stone benches. She was fully conscious again though very pale and she could not look toward the dreadful sight of Aveline’s body impaled below them on the spikes.

Mathew took charge. “Perkin, you are to take Anne back to the house and ask Lady Margaret to join us here. Also, send Mistress Jassy to me—she must bring Father Bartolph. And we will need ropes and a large sheet as quickly as possible, if you please. Anne, you will wait for me in the solar.”

Perkin bowed silently and picked Anne up again as if she’d been no more than a sack of chaff. The stablemaster was impressed by the lack of fuss the girl had made since he’d lifted her up from the hot stone path. And, too, he’d savored the feel of the sweet-smelling, pliant body lying in his arms—small, but unexpectedly rounded in the breast and hips. Quite happily he strode off toward the house, but after a few steps Anne stiffened and insisted on being put down.

“Enough, Perkin. I can walk. Thank you for your kindness but you must put me down.” And though he’d ignored the request at first, after a short time he found himself complying. There was something in the manner of her saying it to him that brought almost automatic obedience…

Above the water gate, Aveline’s sightless eyes looked down on the river and the gauzy veil on her low-crowned hennin fluttered in the breeze like a flag. Mathew and John Lambert stood in silence, each contemplating how to remove the body of the girl from the spikes.

Thoughts chased themselves through Mathew’s head as he looked at what was left of his once beautiful daughter-in-law. He did not know it, but one of the underpinnings of his life had lurched away with the death of this woman; no longer was his faith in God a solid rock. How could the benign Creator of the Universe allow such terrible things to happen? And if it was not God, must he, the man who had insisted on this marriage, be held accountable for these last terrible months and the fact that there were now two bodies to bury—one of them a suicide?

Father Bartolph arrived, trying not to pant. Jassy’s garbled tidings had made him run for the first time in many, many years and his black habit was now sweat soaked. He was followed quickly by Margaret, Jassy, and Perkin Wye, returning with a big, stolid man from the stables, Cob of Linton, slow in his wits but strong.

“Father, we have need to move…the body. But first, I think there should be a prayer for this poor woman’s soul.”

The priest looked most unhappy. Naturally, Jassy had told him what Anne had passed on to her—that Aveline had killed herself. Now, of course, he had a terrible dilemma. Self-murder was a mortal sin and this poor woman could not now be buried in consecrated ground. And since she was dead, it was too late to administer the last sacrament. It was a dreadful fact that, most probably, as they stood there, the soul of Aveline was being taken straight to Hell, for not only was she a murderess but now she had taken yet another life, albeit her own. He shuddered, standing there in the hot sun: it was a fearful thing to contemplate, the eternal lakes of fire in Beelzebub’s domain.

“Master Mathew, this woman has died unshriven and, it seems, in the most terrible mortal sin. I cannot administer the comfort of the church, especially after the fact of her death. But the Lord can be merciful, even to the most grievous of sinners. Perhaps what is left, therefore, is our ability to show compassion as He did to us all.” The priest knelt for a moment, followed by the others around him, and holding up his hand in blessing over the corpse below, murmured a prayer, asking for mercy for the soul of the poor creature.

In the end, taking the body from the spikes had proved easier than any of them expected. Cob, under Perkin’s instructions, had set two ladders up against the wall—one at the head, one at the feet. And when he and Perkin took hold of each end of Aveline’s corpse, they’d been able to lift her off almost immediately.

Now, in the kitchen, when the staff of Blessing House were eating their main meal of the day, Perkin was being pressed for all the gory details, and he was able to say, without exaggeration—which displeased some of his listeners—that her body had come off the spikes with more ease than a pike off a hook. She’d been light, of course, no flesh on her, that’s what had made the difference. Now, if she’d been fatter, or if she’d been wearing one of the new fashionable corsets—work of the Devil, in the opinion of Perkin, women’s natural shape should not be interfered with—it might have been a harder matter and the spikes may not have wanted to give her up so easily.

In the shadows at the back of the kitchen, Anne did her best not to listen. She’d been asked to fetch some food and bring it to the solar, and that had meant she must brave the stares and whispers of the other servants.

Maître Gilles was sensitive to her predicament, as usual. He kept her busy talking as, with his own hands, he quickly assembled the food. Loud discussion over the relative merits of seething freshly slaughtered hens’ flesh in saffron broth or milk with a little French tarragon successfully took up the time needed by Anne to prepare Margaret’s special brass tray with fine white bread and a small pewter tankard of ale. Gilles then dished the chicken breast onto a pewter charger and personally escorted Anne to the door in the kitchen wall so that she was not waylaid by any of the kitchen staff. He assured the girl that he would keep something for her when she was ready to eat and she was not to fret about wagging tongues.

The kind words from the cook threatened to break the knot in Anne’s throat as he handed her the tray and she went up to the solar. But tears would not help now, so she concentrated on keeping the ale in its pot as she climbed toward the crack of light that edged around the solar door.

She had been dismissed to go to the kitchen after an extensive and rugged interrogation by Mathew and John Lambert—so exacting that for one wild moment she thought they were accusing her of causing Aveline’s death. Mathew, in particular, had been harsh, relentlessly probing the exact order in which things had happened, but in the end he agreed she’d had no hand in the tragedy and, catching John Lambert’s eye for agreement, had sent the girl to get food for her mistress while they talked further.

When Anne returned the men were gone. Margaret was holding little Edward, fast asleep from a recent feed, and Jassy’s household account books were spread out around her. Melly was sitting near the hearth, embroidering a dress for the baby. She looked at Anne fearfully, thinking on the wild rumors that were flying through the house—some said Anne had pushed Aveline onto the spikes.

“Put the food over there on the coffer, Anne. Now, Melly, that is well done.” Margaret looked with a critical eye at the stitches so delicately set around the hem of the little garment. “Gather up your work and take Edward back to his nurse. I shall visit him later in the day when he has woken.”

Lady Margaret carefully handed the sleeping baby to Melly. He looks so peaceful, poor little thing, thought Anne, busying herself spreading out a damask napkin over the coffer at the foot of the bed and disposing the simple meal attractively.

“Madam, the food will be cold in a moment if you do not eat.” Anne could see her mistress needed food. After all the stress of the last few weeks there were familiar blue shadows beneath her eyes and her face was very pale. She, like Aveline, had lost a great deal of weight and Anne was concerned that her strength might fail again.

Margaret looked at her serving girl and had many of the same thoughts. To please Anne, she tried to eat some of the delicately prepared food, but after one or two mouthfuls she put the knife and spoon down.