The Serpent Garden - Judith Merkle Riley (6 page)

“Ever so many. How did you know?”

“Never mind, I know what I know.” Nan looked troubled. “Oh, don’t carry on so,” said the widow to her. “I just want her to look after these talented little hands. Girls shouldn’t fill their heads with worries when they’re expecting. Now, you must try to eat a bit. Send the tureen down later.” But I could hear Nan and the widow whispering at the door.

“It doesn’t look good for that child, does it?” said Nan.

“She will be lucky if she loses it now. I know the signs. The infant is poisoning her.” The widow’s voice sank lower. “I lost my oldest girl that way. Newly wed, newly dead. We buried her in her wedding shift.”

“Should I call Goody Forster?”

“It’s too late. There’s nothing for it.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Pray, Mistress Littleton, pray with all your might that that girl comes through safe, or we’ll all be on the street.” My head was splitting. One foot felt as if it wished to twitch and jump of its own accord. Was that one of the signs? How dreadful, how unfair. Death, you deceiver. Mother had only felt a little fever, and then the sweating sickness came and took her away and Father, too, only a week later. Who would have thought it, when only a few months before they had been planning my wedding feast? I could still see Mother in my mind, giving orders to the pastry cooks and serving women in their white aprons who swarmed into our little house, setting down the extra dishes and platters among the drying canvases in Father’s workroom. And then there was Father, his graying hair uncombed, wandering around all grumpy while he surveyed the preparations, for once in his life, useless. Their only comfort was that I was safely wedded to Master Dallet, who said he was rich and promised to take care of me like a queen. And now Death had come again, this time in the form of a baby, making my ankles as thick as tree trunks and my face coarse and swollen in the mirror so that I wouldn’t even look beautiful on my bier and make people sorrow at the great tragedy of it all. No fair, no fair, dying ugly.

I didn’t want to die. My whole body said it wanted to be alive. I looked into the growing dark and saw a terrible shadow thing, all naked, clammy and cold pressing down on my chest, heavy with wickedness. Then it seemed that it had a very ugly face which peered down into my eyes intently and also long, bony fingers which were very ugly. Even though it was only a vision from fever it seemed very real, and it had greedy little red eyes as if it wanted something I didn’t want to give it.

Silently, in my mind, with all the strength my soul owned, I cried out,
Help me
. My eyes seemed to see things all blurry. Through the headache, I could hear the blood in my ears, and a curious rustling sound. There was a flash of light like the glint on armor. Something strong and fierce had come into the room. The shadow thing boiled ragefully above me at it, and I swear I could see the bed curtains, which were pulled back, sway and blow with the hidden tempest. I felt mortally tired, and as my eyes closed to welcome death, something said,
We’re here
. No, you’re not, I answered in my mind. Nobody’s left here but me and Nan and black, shrouded death. Nobody.

“It is here, my lords.” The goldsmith had sent away his apprentices for the day, and his furnace was cold. Rain battered against his closed shutters and trickled through a leak in the ceiling of his workshop. It landed with a melancholy drop, drop, drop sound in a puddle on the dirt floor. The Lombard looked about him with a sniff, taking in the shabbiness, the stiff, old-fashioned models on the workshop table, the calipers and molds hung on the walls. How backward, how primitive these English artisans were. In Italy, this man would never be admitted to a mastership. With a flourish, Master Jonas unveiled a cloth-wrapped bundle in the center of the worktable. Brassy and glittering, it looked very like a large, flattened goblet on a footed stand. Strange characters were carved about the rim, and the stand, at the inspiration of the goldsmith, had been decorated with a pair of shapeless, bloated salamanders.

“Ah,” exclaimed the Lombard, impressed by the glossy shine of the thing.

“Have you looked in it?” asked Crouch, his eyes narrowed with suspicion.

“Well, only to burnish it. But I did it in secret. No one else in the household has seen it.”

“And just what did you see?” asked Crouch, and the oozing tone of his voice set the goldsmith’s heart suddenly beating hard.

“Why, just my own face. What else is there to see?” The Lombard looked suddenly at Crouch, his heart alert as he scented treachery.

“Ah, the words. One must know the words,” said Crouch, his voice reassuring. Taking off his gloves, he passed his hands over the flat surface of the remade Mirror of Diocletian.
“Tapas, menahim, orglolas…”
He leaned over the worktable and peered into the mirror. “My face?” he said softly to himself. “What is this?” With a ferocious look he turned on the goldsmith. “Did you hold back gold?”

“S-steal your gold? Never, my lord. You yourself saw me weigh it and cast it into the crucible.”

“The virgin’s blood?” said the Lombard, in his heavy accent, looking at Crouch.

“I assure you, it could have been no other. It was the blood of an eight-year-old girl.” The goldsmith’s voice broke into the furious recriminations.

“Look, my lords, something moves on the surface.” Three velvet-capped heads pressed around the mirror.

“Ah, I was right. He has it,” whispered Crouch, as he saw his own worst fear reflected up at him in the magic mirror. “Ludlow, the traitor. He’s bought the manuscript from the widow.”

But the Lombard’s companion saw an entirely different scene moving in the shining yellow metal. As his secret thoughts revealed themselves in the reflection, he shouted, “The whore! With my confessor! And with my own wine!” He tore his gaze from the mirror. “I always knew that wife of mine was no good.” He stood up suddenly and put his hand to his sword hilt. “I must be going,” he said as he hurried from the room. “This time I mean to catch them at it.”

Miraculous, thought the goldsmith, as he watched him go. How fortunate I have memorized the formula. It shows truth to everyone. Why, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, reflected in this wonderful mirror, I would have no proof that my apprentices were stealing those eggs from my henhouse. Little wretches. I always knew I couldn’t trust them….

Crouch rewrapped the curious object and thrust it under his cloak.

“My payment?” asked the goldsmith.

“Oh, yes, Master Jonas. Come to my house this afternoon and we’ll be waiting with it.” Crouch and the Lombard cast significant glances at each other, which the goldsmith, his mind aflame with thoughts of the wickedness of his apprentices, never even noticed.

Five

T
HAT
night after my husband’s bloody corpse had been brought home, I had a terrible dream, which seemed very real and almost as if I weren’t dreaming at all. I woke up in my dream to see that the baby that was inside me was already born. But instead of being small and newborn, the baby was a big ugly boy of about two years old, bony, pale, and with dark, lank hair. He was doubled up in a cradle beside my bedside, and hardly fit, even so, with his strangely long, knobby legs. His huge eyes, shining green like the glowing eyes of owls, fascinated me. Above him, around him, there seemed to hover an evil presence, like a dark shadow.

That big bony changeling whimpered there for food. But what kind? When I tried to go to it, I couldn’t move, as if something heavy were preventing me from getting up from the bed. When the strange creature saw that it couldn’t draw me to the cradle with the look in its green glowing eyes, it spoke: “Mother,” it mewled, “oh, I’m so hungry.” But when it opened its mouth, I saw an even row of pointed teeth, shining almost bluish white like sharp little fish teeth. My skin tingled with fear.

“Mother, come,” whined the demonic child.

“Don’t touch it,” said a strange voice.

“But I have to,” I answered.

“Let it go. It is evil incarnate.” Ah, God, is that what I had been growing inside me all that time? Evil? What was I that I couldn’t bear a child like other women have? It couldn’t be true. I wanted my child.

“Let it go,” said the voice. “Can’t you feel the wickedness of it? The force? If you let it, it will suck away your soul.” I could feel the evil. It was like a coming thunderstorm, that makes your scalp tingle, and the hair on your arms and legs stand on end. It was pulling me, and I could feel the inferno beyond. Oh, help, help me, I cried in my mind.

“Hold tight. Pull with us, Susanna. You must will it away,” said the powerful creature that was holding me tight, pulling me from the abyss. I could hear its heavy wings beating and I suddenly felt that there was more than one of them, as if it had had to call for help from its friends because the black sucking thing was so strong. In the dream, of course, I was very glad to have it, or them, though in real life I would have been more careful about entrusting myself to strangers like that.

“Why?” I cried out in my dream.

“Rowland Dallet, in seeking a treasure, managed to free a being of chaos and destruction. It followed him home. Now it wants an earthly body, and like a cukoo’s egg in the nest, it has displaced the child beneath your heart. Do you not understand it will discard you like an empty shell when it is ready to hatch? It counts on your misplaced love to nourish it with your life. We have shown you what it is. And now I say, let it go before it pulls you from my grasp.”

“It’s my baby and I want it.”

“It is none of yours any longer. You must let that creature go,” said the voice, which vibrated like the deepest bell in Paul’s steeple. For an instant, the room was illuminated in shifting colors, and I saw a towering column of radiant light, streaming up through the roof, miles into the sky. The column was somehow human in form. It had a beautiful face, somber and glorious, and wings that stretched to the heavens. My heart beat hard. But I gathered my courage and spoke again. “If I let him go, what will I have left? I have no money, I have no family. Now I won’t even have a baby. I’ll have nothing at all.”

“Nothing?” came the voice. “No, something. See this.” The radiant being moved one hand slowly across the night sky. Where it passed, the black, star-flecked heavens were erased and the blue of a summer noon took its place. Sweeping across the sky was the shimmering arc of a great rainbow. “It’s yours, if you can pick it up in your hands,” the enigmatic creature said.

“But how? I can’t. Nobody can. How can I do it? What if I can’t? Stay, stay! Tell me more.” But the glowing column had vanished. The room was dark and small. A foul smell and eerie, sulfurous glow surrounded the cradle, which was empty, and stained with black blood.

I woke much later, very weak. Full daylight was in the room, and Nan was peering in my face. “Her eyes, they’re open!” she cried. “Look what we have for you, everything you craved. Here is marmalet, made of oranges, just as you said. And a length of linen. And Mistress Hull found a cradle, ready made, for sale. And see here, Brother Thomas has brought you from the captain two lengths of the very finest wool. Just feel it!” She put the wool by my cheek. I turned my head on the pillow. My heart felt cold. Beside my bed stood the evil cradle of the dream. It had not been there the night before.

“How—how did you get all these in only one night?” I asked.

“Oh, dear, it’s been more than a night. It’s been three nights, and three days, too,” said Mistress Hull, who was sitting on the bench, sewing. “And we’ve watched all the time. You fell into a strange sleep, like death, and couldn’t be waked. Sometimes you screamed. Once we had to hold you down, for fear of injury.” Nan looked embarrassed, as if she hadn’t planned on telling me.

“
Shush
. You know you shouldn’t disturb her in this condition,” she said to Mistress Hull and gave her that slit-eyed look that can stop runaway horses but didn’t stop Mistress Hull, who was even older than Nan and thought that gave her precedence.

“So much has happened,” went on Mistress Hull, who is like me in that she doesn’t like to be cut off in midstory. “Oh, a world of things. Master Dallet’s funeral was as fine as a body could want, and the coffin was very elegant, though it did give off a bad smell, as if it had burst under the pall. But they did him honor, and you, too.”

“Not that he deserved it,” broke in Nan.

“My husband? Buried? Buried so soon?” For some reason, I felt more bereft than ever. How like Master Dallet to depart in grand ceremony provided at the expense of others and let me have no part in it. At least in death he might have let me have the place of honor I had earned in marriage. I could have walked behind his coffin and people would have respected me. Even dead, that man was a cheat.

“But oh, there were some very elegant people there, very elegant indeed, and strangers. One of them, a distinguished gentleman with two white streaks in his hair, very rich and genial, approached me and said he wished to make arrangements to care for Master Dallet’s son, when he’s born in the summer, and raise him in his very own household.” Mistress Hull was bursting with the news.

“‘And what about my mistress?’ I asked him,” interrupted Nan, eager to show that she was the cleverest and thought of everything, “and he said, ‘Oh, I’ll take care of her, too. Master Dallet was a very close friend of mine.’ But I swear, I’ve never seen the man before.” Nan’s words tumbled over Mistress Hull’s.

“But he seemed like a very great gentleman. His hat was trimmed with a great jewel and a very fine plume. His eyes were very pale, and he kept looking all about him. I took him for a very brilliant sort of man, too brilliant for me, I must say. I could hear him talking to others, so very high, with things like Latin words just thrown in, the way lawyers and clerks do, so very learned! He wore a robe in mossy-colored velvet, and his hose were silk, real silk. Fine as a king’s, they were.” Mistress Hull might not know Latin, but she knew price better than a pawnbroker.

“And don’t forget the gold chain, very massive, with a strange device on it.”

“They told me he was a magistrate, an important magistrate, and a very rich man. Oh, you have no idea how we longed for your eyes to open. And now, you see, there’s so much to know.” Nan didn’t say any more but I am sure she was thinking what occurred to me at that very moment, that there is something entirely suspicious about rich important magistrates who suddenly ask to look after someone’s baby, especially when it is not a prince but just an ordinary sort of baby that has not even been kidnapped by Turkish pirates.

“Oh, quiet, quiet. Can’t you see we’ve tired her? How do you feel, my poor little dove? Better now? Surely, you must be better.” In answer, I shrieked. The pains were on me, and this time there was no mistaking it. The creature would be born.

“Cat, go and fetch Goody Forster—and don’t dawdle,” cried Mistress Hull. “Run, now!” And the widow’s daughter was off, while Nan stroked my hand and tried to tell me that everything would be all right, and that early babies were often lucky.

“But it won’t be, Nan, I saw him in a dream. A boy, with black hair—”

“Hush, now, hush. You must pray to Saint Margaret. Surely she will see it born safely.”

“But I don’t want it born. I tell you, I saw it. It’s a boy. A boy with black hair. And, and—there’s something wrong with it.”

At midnight, by the light of candles, the midwife brought out the head of the creature, and soon after, held it in her hands. “It’s a boy,” she said softly. “Born dead. Most likely dead awhile.” Goody Forster was a round woman with kindly eyes, and much experience of grief. I lay as limp as a dead eel, but I could hear.

“What—what color hair?” said Nan, her voice low and shocked.

“Black, from what I can see,” answered Goody Forster. “And—oh, God, look at the mouth!” Her voice rang with horror.

“Jesus save us,” said Nan. “It’s got teeth. Pointed ones!”

“God in heaven, I’ve never seen the like.” Mistress Hull’s voice was shocked. “Look at them, all fine and small, like fish teeth. Just as well it’s dead. What woman would give it suck?”

“Don’t let her see it,” said Goody Forster. “The sooner it’s buried, the better.” Even so, I caught a glimpse of the dreadful thing, dead and shriveled up, no bigger than a bald rat, with a head the shape of a ferret’s. But it had very nicely made tiny hands even if they did have fingernails just like claws, and as I saw it there, lying with its shriveled afterbirth in a great copper bowl that might have served for its first bath, I could feel tears running down my face with the shock and disappointment. Was there something so secretly vicious in me that this was what I had earned in life? Somewhere, someone was howling like a wolf.
Shh
, I heard them say, and I could feel hands shaking me, so I knew the howling was me.

“I’ll get rid of it quietly,” said the midwife.

“No, we’ll manage,” said Mistress Hull, laying some extra money in her hand to keep her quiet. “I don’t trust that woman, she’s a talker,” she whispered to Nan as Goody Forster stumped off downstairs.

“We’ll wrap it up tight and have it buried properly, and give out that it was a beauty, slain by its mother’s grief, and gone to join its father in heaven. Heaven, ha! It’s gone to join him somewhere, but not
there
. If everyone is talking about our story, they might not notice hers.” Together they burned the bloody straw of the birth mattress and then went out to bribe the sexton at Saint Vedast’s to have it buried in an unmarked grave in the corner of the churchyard. But even dead, that ugly thing went on bringing evil. There was a fire in the church porch that was barely put out in time to save the whole building on the night that the sexton buried it. And it was the last baby that Goody Forster’s strong hands ever delivered, because the very next day, she died in an accident when several heavy tiles came loose from a roof and fell on her just as she was passing beneath. Then I knew that I was cursed, because this ghastly work of my inmost self had wrought such monstrous things in the world.

My husband’s funeral, with all its pomp, turned out to be a great mistake. Master Dallet, having been buried as he lived, beyond his means, played his final trick on me, in spite of all that I had striven to remake him in my mind as much kinder and more loving. Before the memorial brass was even placed in the wall at Saint Vedast, his creditors determined that he must have been wealthy after all due to the splendor of the arrangements which I had provided and not even got to partake of. I was still bedridden when the first of them arrived, the apothecary from whom he bought his colors. From the remains of the three pounds, I paid him, for he was an honest man and besides he had a sad face and twelve children and a sick wife, he said.

Then came the tavern owners, the whoremasters, and the gamesters, and with each one I discovered more about my dead husband’s secret life. By the time the goldsmith came to reclaim the setting of a ring unpaid for, I shouted at him, “Go collect it from his whore, Mistress Pickering!” and Nan added, “You ought to be ashamed, hounding a poor widow who has just lost her only child,” as he departed down the stairs. By that time, all the money was gone, including the purse from the guilty captain.

“Oh, dear, oh, dear, they’re swarming like flies,” said Mistress Hull, who had come to see how I was. “I just saw a notary and a draper go down the stairs. Any more up here?”

“Not just now,” I muttered.

“Well, Mistress Littleton, from hard experience I can tell you it’s time we hid Mistress Dallet’s paints and personal things, or the creditors will have them all. How can she paint for us if there’s nothing left?” So the two of them went to work, carrying the lengths of fine black wool, the sewing things, the easels, table, and paints down the stairs. It was a task that suited her, for it allowed her to inspect our household goods even more closely than before.

“What’s this chest? It looks terribly heavy. Foreign, isn’t it? My, that’s nice brasswork.”

“It’s Flemish. They do things fancier there. Let’s try to take it. Get your Cat to help. Maybe if we empty it we can get it down the stairs.” So then they had to empty it out and put all my husband’s good portrait drawings right on the floor, which seemed something of a sacrilege but not as much of a one as putting my special books,
The Most Esteemed Life of the Holy Virgin and Mother of God
and
The Good Wyfe’s Book of Manners
, right there too, even if they were on top of the drawings.

“Now what’s this bit of a book here? It hasn’t even got any cover,” Nan said. I squinted at the thing. It was all wiggly handwriting that no normal person could read even if it were in English, which it wasn’t. But it was the highest grade of unborn parchment, and the margins were very wide, just like new, with only the faintest touch of mildew on one corner.