Plague Land (5 page)

Returning to the boy with the cartwheel I asked him where the Starvecrows lived, but once again he stared at me blankly. Now I spoke slowly and purposefully. ‘The Starve . . . crows. Mat . . . hilda. Starve . . . crow.’

His large blue eyes wandered around my face, and then moved to my ear. I touched the side of my face in case there was something hanging from it, but found it to be perfectly clear. Now losing my patience, I shouted at the boy for an answer, but my tone was too harsh causing him to drop the mallet and bolt inside the cottage.

I cursed out loud and was turning to leave when a woman’s voice called to me. ‘Is that you out there, sire?’

‘Yes. Who’s there?’ I approached the doorway and pushed aside some rough cloth to reveal a room full of silent women and children, their faces regarding me distrustfully. A small girl began to cry and buried her head into her mother’s chest.

‘Why are you all hiding in here?’ I asked. The room was dark and airless.

Nobody answered. Instead they shuffled aside to reveal an old woman wrapped in a grey woollen shawl. Her body was as still and lumpish as a heavy sack of flour.

‘Good morning to you, sire. I’m Eleanor. I was once your mother’s lady’s maid.’ I didn’t recognise the woman, but thought it rude to say so. ‘Step into the light and let me see you.’ I obliged and moved a little to the right, causing her to gasp. ‘So tall now. And your hair still so fair. But where to goodness is the flesh on you? You should eat goose fat, sire. Goose! It fattens the arms, not the belly.’

I had been fed on a diet of goose fat since the age of seven, and it had achieved no effect upon my physique other than to give me spots and indigestion.

I repeated my question. ‘Why have you all huddled in here?’

Eleanor clasped her hands together. ‘To keep safe, sire. From the murderous beast.’ The women then mumbled into their dirty veils and pulled their shawls about them, as if this supposed beast might be a draught of cold air. They were the last remains of the village, with faces so grey and exhausted they might almost be mourning their survival. A thin baby mewled, its skin loose against its cheekbones.

‘You must return to your homes,’ I told them. ‘We’ll find the true murderer.’

‘Indeed, sire. The men are praying for deliverance with Father John.’

‘Why didn’t you join them?’

Eleanor shook her head. ‘The women will stay inside their cottages until the beast is caught. That way it cannot bite our throats or taint us again with its pestilence.’

‘There is no beast,’ I said. ‘The murderer is a man.’ But this statement of fact did not reassure the women in the manner I had hoped. Instead a clamour arose. ‘Is Matilda Starvecrow here?’ I asked in an attempt to distract them from crossing themselves or sobbing into their surcoats. They didn’t hear me at first, so I shouted. ‘Matilda Starvecrow?’

Now there was an abrupt silence.

‘The girl isn’t here, sire,’ Eleanor told me.

‘Then how do I find her cottage?’

Eleanor shooed the other women out of the way and stood up slowly with the use of a stick. ‘Let me speak with you privately, my lord,’ she whispered, as the murmuring recommenced. ‘Leave these poor souls to their prayers.’

She was unsteady, so I took her arm and we made our way outside the cottage so she might sit on the rough bench by the door. The small boy followed us and resumed bashing at his cartwheel, even though I asked him to stop.

Eleanor touched the boy’s shoulder and put her finger to her lips. ‘Don’t be cross with him, sire. He’s been deaf as a dor beetle since the pox. He suffered as a baby.’

She then settled herself down and bade me sit next to her. ‘It’s a shame I can’t tend to your mother no more. But I’m full of the dropsy.’ She poked a swollen foot out from under the shawl. ‘See that? You can press your finger in there and make a pit.’

‘How awful for you,’ I said, declining the unpleasant invitation. ‘Have you taken a draining tonic?’

She waved the idea away. ‘Never off the piss pot after one of those things.’ Then she took my arm affectionately. ‘But tell me about my lady. Are her humours settled?’

‘Mother is well at present, thank you.’ I paused. ‘Now please. If you would tell me how to get to the Starvecrow cottage.’

But she ignored my request completely. ‘And how is she coping after your father’s death? And those of your poor sweet brothers’?’ She shook her head and sighed. ‘And dying in Rochester. Not even in their own beds.’

‘It was a shock to us all. But then, no family has been—’

‘And I heard your father had to carry the bodies of William and Richard to the pit himself. What an indignity! It’ll be what finished him off, you know.’

I shifted away from her so that she was forced to drop my arm. ‘Eleanor. Please. I need to find the Starvecrow cottage.’

She wrapped her shawl about her. ‘You sure you want to go there, my lord?’ She then shivered, though I felt it was an exaggeration. Probably an affectation she had learnt in my mother’s service. ‘Some say the girl is cursed.’

‘I don’t believe in curses.’

‘Perhaps you should?’

I shook my head firmly. ‘No. I never will.’

Then she laughed and took hold of my arm again. ‘Very well then, sire. But you shouldn’t need me to give directions to the Starvecrow cottage. Ask your own feet to take you. They’ve taken you there enough times before.’

‘No. I’ve never been to the place.’

She laughed again, but this time it developed into a hewing cough and it was a while before she had composed herself. ‘But sire. You were nursed at the cottage by Adeline Starvecrow. Alison and Matilda’s mother. Don’t you remember?’

I shook my head. ‘That can’t be right.’

‘She nursed you until you were three. Always running to her tit you were.’

‘You must be mistaken. Mother would have employed a nursemaid to come to the manor.’

‘No, no. Your mother sent you to the village. You upset her humours with all your screaming.’ She laughed again, but this time stifled the cough. ‘Begging your pardon, sire, but you were a shrill and tiresome baby.’

‘The Starvecrow cottage?’

Her smile dropped. ‘You were better off farmed out to a village wife. That was the truth of it.’

‘Eleanor!’

‘Follow the path by the standard oak. It’s through the coppice and down in the valley.’

I found the Starvecrow cottage at the bottom of two banks, next to a stream that plunged its way belligerently through the undergrowth. The smell of the place was sickening. I don’t just mean the usual scent of farmyard that attends the poor. There was an additional layer of dankness here – the odour of damp cellar or a woollen vest left too long in the washtub. Mother would never have sent me to such a place as an infant, so I dismissed Eleanor’s story as a wandering of her mind.

At the bottom of the bank I climbed over an apple tree that had fallen into the stream and was now re-routing the water through a hog hole. As my boots sank into the mud, a young girl appeared at the door of the cottage.

‘Are you the boy with no eyes?’ she asked me. Her face was lucent and impassive, like the effigy of a saint.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I can see perfectly.’

‘Are you sure? I’ve lost one eye. Now it’s a pebble at the bottom of the sea.’

I scratched my head. ‘Is this some sort of riddle?’

‘I still have my own eye,’ she told me. ‘But there is another. A half-eye that looks at the sky.’

It seems I had progressed from conversing with a wandering mind to a lost one. ‘Are you Matilda Starvecrow?’ I asked. She didn’t answer, preferring to gaze at the swallows that swooped about us in search of flies. ‘I said, are you Matilda Starvecrow!’ Something cold and slimy was seeping into my boots, and squelching between my toes.

‘Yes. I’m Matilda,’ she answered at last.

‘I need to speak to you.’ I pulled my feet from the mud. ‘We should go inside. The horseflies are biting me.’

The cottage was no more than a single chamber without windows. As Matilda opened the door I could see a crude wooden bed, a cooking pot, a fire pit, and an axe. The floor was laid with rushes that looked clean enough, but the room was smoky and confining. A small fire smouldered in spite of the warmth of the day.

I should have felt pity for the girl, having to live in such an ill-favoured place, but there was something sly in her manner. She had not curtsied to me yet. Moreover she had allowed the decrepit door to swing back in my face when I entered the house, and had not apologised. I rubbed my nose and left the door open to let some air blow into the place – but only succeeded in allowing the stench from outside to invade the chamber.

‘My name is Oswald de Lacy,’ I told her.

‘I know who you are.’

Her pale blue eyes stood out in the gloom, and suddenly I recognised something about her – just as I had when looking upon the face of her dead sister. Fine hair framed a thin, dainty face. It was an unpleasant recollection, so I looked away, but found it no more comfortable to be glancing about the room, where elongated shadows formed eerie shapes in the rutted daub of the walls. The door opened and closed in a sudden gust, which ignited the embers into a few short-lived flames.

‘I’m sorry about your sister Alison,’ I told her. ‘But I will find her murderer.’

She smiled somewhat scornfully at these words and then started to hum, meaning I had to cough to get her attention. ‘I need to ask you some questions, Matilda.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it would assist me in solving the crime.’

Now she laughed at me.

‘Don’t you want to help?’ She only cocked her head and stared at something beyond my shoulder. I persevered nonetheless. ‘I understand your sister recently came to the manor house to see me. Do you know what she wanted?’

Matilda sat down on the floor. ‘Why ask me? When you know the answer?’

‘Because I don’t.’

She played with the rushes between her fingers. ‘Are you sure? I never saw my sister again. Not after she visited you.’

‘But I didn’t see Alison. I was away at market.’

Now she pushed aside the rushes and drew the outline of an eye in the dust of the floor. ‘Half an eye. Looks at the sky,’ she sang as she began to sway to and fro.

‘Please stop doing that,’ I said.

‘Half an eye. Looks at the sky,’ she continued, now louder – blowing herself into a frenzy. I tried to lay a hand gently on her shoulder to see if this might pacify her, but the rocking had increased with such violence that it was impossible to get near her. I gave up on this interview and turned to leave when, in a moment, the storm seemed to blow itself out.

Now she had calmed herself to a shallow gust, I tried again. ‘I need to know why your sister came to see me, Matilda. Do you think you can remember?’ She swayed and whispered and didn’t respond to my question. Her eyes were distant and glassy, and a faint smile curled upon her lips.

Once again I was struck by the familiarity of this face. Had I seen the girl about the village? Did she sometimes work at the house? I endeavoured to make the connection, but my memory would not oblige.

Instead I took her hand and whispered softly. ‘Was there something Alison wanted to tell me? Please try to remember, Matilda. It would be very helpful to know.’

‘Oswald. Oswald. Half an eye. Oswald, Oswald, looks at the sky.’

It was futile. When she resumed her rocking I turned to leave, but now she lunged forward and snatched the tail of my cloak.

‘Your father liked to visit my mother,’ she said, her eyes suddenly focussing.

‘What nonsense is this?’ I tried to pull my cloak away from her, but she wouldn’t loosen her grip. I pulled again, but she was resolute.

‘Father, father. Eye of a lover,’ she sang.

‘What do you mean about my father? Stop it!’

‘Liked to visit over and over.’

Each time I succeeded in dragging one corner of my cloak from her, she caught hold of another part – her hands clinging to me like the tentacles of a sea monster. When I had finally removed her from my clothing, she then attached herself to my feet.