The Vanishing Witch (5 page)

But if the boy didn’t toughen up, a miserable time he would have of it. Apprentices and journeymen could spot a weakling the moment he walked through
the door and would make him the butt of every cruel jest that young lads can devise. Barely a month went by without some young apprentice hanging himself in his master’s workshop to escape the torment. And for all that Robert did not dote on the boy, he would never want to see his son unhappy.

Tenney flung open the door at the back of the hall, which led to the courtyard and the kitchen, and
bore in a great dish of beef stew. A rich steam, heavy with vinegar, cinnamon, cloves, mace, ginger, sage and onion, wafted through the room. Beata, the maid, followed with a basket of fresh bread. She gave Robert a reproachful look, as vexed as her mistress by his late arrival, but Robert knew it was more because he’d put Edith in a bad humour than for any fear that the stew would spoil. Beata took
far too much pride in her cooking ever to allow that to happen.

The arrival of supper was a welcome diversion and the piquant steam sharpened their already keen appetites. They had barely swallowed a mouthful when the door from the courtyard was flung open and Jan strolled in. Adam scrambled from his chair and, heedless of his father’s earlier warning, ran across to him, jigging expectantly from
foot to foot. ‘Did you get it, Jan? Did you?’

His brother grinned and, with a flourish, produced a small wooden model of a trebuchet, used to hurl stones at castles under siege. He held the toy high in the air, making Adam leap for it. Adam’s eyes shone as he whispered his thanks.

Robert’s elder son had lodgings near the warehouse on the Braytheforde harbour. It was an arrangement he and his
father had come to by mutual consent. It was easier for Jan, as Robert’s steward, to keep a close eye on the business, but it also meant that if the lad came home drunk after a night with his friends at the cockpits or with some girl hanging on his arm, Robert, and more importantly Edith, wouldn’t know of it – at least, not immediately. Nothing happened in Lincoln that was not round the city by the
following day. Even so, Jan usually called in each day to see his mother and reassure her that he was not lying dead in a ditch and had not contracted some fever in the night, which Edith would imagine, if a day passed without her seeing him.

With a friendly nod towards Thomas, he crossed to his mother, planting a kiss on her cheek as she lifted her face to him. She patted his shoulder. ‘Even
later than your father,’ she murmured. ‘He works you much too hard.’

‘The last of the cargo arrived late from Boston and I wanted to check that the tallies were correct,’ Jan said, helping himself to a large measure of wine. ‘And don’t worry, Father, I doubled the watch on the warehouse.’

Edith’s head snapped round. ‘But I thought you said you were checking the cargo, Robert.’

Jan glanced sharply
at his father. ‘He was, but I knew you’d want him home, so I said I’d finish.’

He slid into the chair next to his mother, who patted his hand affectionately. ‘You’re a good son to your father, Jan.’

‘Yes, I rather think I am, aren’t I, Father?’ Jan said, staring pointedly at Robert.

Robert avoided meeting his son’s questioning gaze and concentrated on the stew. He felt irritation mounting again.
He had done nothing for which to reproach himself but he was annoyed to be caught out in a lie by Jan. The boy had always looked up to him, and he was proud of the way his son was shaping up to follow in his footsteps. Not that he would tell Jan so, for Robert did not believe in indulging his sons.

‘I trust the loads all tallied?’ he asked sternly.

Jan hesitated.

Robert lowered a sop of gravy-soaked
bread that was halfway to his mouth. ‘Out with it, lad.’

‘One of the boatmen lost a bale overboard on the way back from Boston. He said he’d been rammed by another punt. It’s the third accident of this sort in as many weeks. But I got talking to a man in the inn last night. He’d just returned from Horncastle market. He swore he’d seen a bale of our cloth being hawked by one of the pedlars. The
seal had been cut away, but he knew it for our shade of dye and reckoned it had never been near a drop of water.’

Robert’s face turned puce. ‘One of our own boatmen stealing from us? What have you done about it?’

Thomas looked equally furious. ‘Have you sent for the bailiff, Jan, had him arrested? I can assure you, Robert, if this is proved, he’ll be dangling by the neck from the castle walls
after the next assizes.’

Jan refilled his goblet and drained it before he seemed sufficiently braced to answer. ‘It’s not just one boatman. These accidents are happening to different men, different boats. We can’t arrest them all – we’d have no men left to work the river. Besides, proving that any of them stole the bales rather than lost them will not be easy.’ Seeing the fury building on Robert’s
face, he added quickly, ‘I reckon someone’s behind it, paying them to do it. That’s the man we’ve got to find. But I will find him, Father, and when I do, I’ll hand him trussed and bound to Sheriff Thomas. That I swear.’

Thomas nodded approvingly. ‘The lad’s right, Robert. They must be selling them on to someone, and once we have him in the castle dungeons, I’ll soon make him talk. Show him the
gallows and he’ll be eager to turn king’s approver and name all those involved. We’ll winkle them out, Robert, don’t you fear. I’ll have my informers keep their ears flapping in the taverns and marketplaces. They’re bound to hear something sooner or later.’

‘It’s the talk of
later
that concerns me,’ Robert said. ‘I can’t afford to keep losing goods while your spies loll at alewives’ doors, drinking
the city’s savings in the hope of hearing something. Between these thefts and the King’s taxes, money is running out of my coffers like sand through an hour-glass, and with the weavers in Flanders in rebellion, there is precious little going back in to refill them.’

He slammed his goblet onto the table. ‘At least this evening has resolved one thing. The rents on my properties must be raised.
And this time I’ll not let you talk me out of it, Jan. This is your future as well as mine and your mother’s. I’ll not stand by and see my family ruined.’

‘But I’ve told you before, Father, they’re struggling already. I inspect our tenants’ cottages each year and I can see things are getting worse for a good many of them.’

‘Since the boatmen who are stealing from me are my tenants, they may
think themselves well served,’ Robert said. ‘Thieves deserve no less.’

‘But it won’t fill your coffers if they can’t pay,’ Jan protested. ‘You can’t get water from a river that’s run dry.’

‘They can pay. When they’re stealing the cargoes I’m giving them money to deliver, they’re earning twice over. You’re too easily gulled, lad – isn’t that right, Thomas? They know you’re coming and spirit half
their stock and belongings away to make themselves seem poor, then fetch it back when you’ve gone. It’s a game they’ve been playing for years.’

The same mulish expression darkened the faces of father and son. If only they were not so alike, they would lock horns less often. Robert would win, he always did, but Jan was right: it was the cottagers who would suffer.

If the October moon appears with the points of her crescent up, the month will be dry, if down, wet.

A woman was carrying a little boy who was eating an apple. They met a neighbour on the road, who took a bite from the apple and returned it to the child. Until that hour, the boy had been strong and healthy. From that moment he began to waste away, and shortly after, he died.

Master Robert thinks he has troubles and so he has, for when you own much, you fear much too. And
no man who’s spent a lifetime building his wealth fleece by fleece, bale by bale relishes the prospect of having it all snatched away before he can pass it to his sons. But such fears are not confined to the wealthy. The poor also dread losing what little they have and some have troubles enough to fill the nine lives of a cat, but without so much as a whisker of a cat’s good luck.

Gunter was
one such man, who scratched out a living in Lincoln, or rather in a piss-poor village nearby, known as Greetwell, though Gunter, who’d never known better, counted the place home.

The sun hung low in the sky, as he hefted the heavy peats from his punt. He pushed them up onto the riverbank so that his daughter, Royse, and her brother, Hankin, could carry them to the lean-to shelter beside the cottage
and stack them ready to burn through the long winter months. As usual, Royse was trying to outdo her brother, and they were piling them under the reed thatch with such haste that Gunter warned them to take more care. ‘Get a good steddle laid first, else the whole stack’ll tumble down.’

But he might as well have been talking to the wind. Royse, just coming up to fourteen, was a headstrong, wiry
little lass. The first signs of womanhood were pushing out the front of her kirtle, but she still behaved more like a boy than a woman, never walking when she could run, never sitting still if she could climb. Hankin, a good year or so younger, was already taller than his sister, shooting up like a sapling and just as skinny. Ever since he’d managed to pull himself to his little feet and toddle
after her, he’d been determined to prove himself tougher than her, but she’d never made it easy for him.

Gunter blew on his numbed hands to warm them. It was a raw day, the wind sharp and wet, the ground sodden after all the rain. He’d be glad when the frosts came. The damp ate deep into the bones. Great pools still covered the fields where the river had flooded. It had at last receded, but it
would take longer to drain from the land. They’d waded through stinking river water inside the cottage for nigh on a week before it had gone, but they were used to that. It happened most years, and Gunter could read the river like the back of his hand. He knew when to shift kegs and barrels up to the hay loft, so little was lost.

With the last of the peats safe on the bank, he hauled himself
out of the punt and picked his way down the muddy track, eager for something warm to fill his belly.

He was a short, stocky man, and the muscles of his arms and legs were thick and corded from years of punting. Despite the cold he wore only a sleeveless tunic of stained brown homespun, which reached to his thighs, and breeches so faded and grimy that it was hard to tell if they’d ever owned a
colour.

He walked with a strange gait, heaving his left leg out in an arc until he could place it flat directly beneath him. On the water, his element, he appeared no different from other men, but on land the stranger’s gaze was immediately drawn to his leg. He had tried many different shapes of wooden leg over the years, spending the long winter evenings whittling whenever he had a fresh idea
and could find a good piece of wood. But finally he had settled on this as being best for balancing on the punt as his body twisted, and for spreading his weight as he limped across the boggy ground around his home.

His cottage huddled close to the riverbank on one of the few firm patches of ground between the river and the Edge, a ridge of cliff that ran behind the fields and marshlands. The
main village of Greetwell sat high on the Edge, safe from floods and the midges that swarmed over the bogs and mires below in summer, but a boatman couldn’t live up there: he’d lose hours each day traipsing to and from his punt, precious hours when he should be earning. Besides, Gunter had lived by the river all his life and couldn’t sleep without the sound of water rushing through his dreams.

He pressed down on the latch and pushed against the door, swollen and warped after the flood. The stench of damp and river mud rolled out. The bunches of dried herbs and onions hanging from the rafters rocked in the sudden draught as he stepped inside. He closed the door hastily behind him as a billow of smoke swirled up from the fire. The single-roomed cottage was a tight squeeze for five people,
but Gunter had never known bigger. Two beds occupied the space against the walls on either side, with shelves above to store boxes and clay jars. The rest of the room was pretty much taken up with a table and stools, but they needed little else.

Nonie glanced up briefly as her husband entered and straightway spooned pottage into a wooden bowl from the pot hanging over the fire. She didn’t need
to be told that her husband was hungry. There were no cargoes to fetch on a Sunday, but that meant work of a different sort, fetching fuel for the winter and fodder for the two goats.

In the fifteen years since they had hand-fasted, Gunter had never once returned home without feeling thankful to find Nonie there. As a child, he’d watched his mother stirring a pot over a fire, turning to smile
at him, as Nonie did now. It had never occurred to him that his mother would not always be standing there when he returned from play. Even as the Great Pestilence swept through the land, he had not believed it could reach his cottage, until the day he had come home from gathering kindling to find his mother dead and his father dying. Ever since, it had been Gunter’s nightmare that one day he might
return to find the fire cold and his family once again ripped from him.

Gunter glanced down at the beaten-earth floor where four-year-old Col, his youngest child, was sitting. The tip of his pink tongue stuck out in concentration as he tried to knot pieces of old cord together.

‘What you up to, Bor?’

When the boy didn’t answer, he looked at Nonie.

She shook her head in exasperation. ‘He’s
making himself a net, says he going fishing. This is your doing, it is, telling him what you used to catch as a lad. A fish with a gold piece in its belly, indeed.’

Gunter chuckled, holding up his hands. ‘It’s true, I swear it. Didn’t you ever hear tell of St Egwin? He fettered his ankles with an iron chain, threw the key into the river, then walked all the way to Rome to see the pope. The pope
ordered a fish for dinner and when he opened it, the key to the saint’s fetters was inside.’

Nonie snorted. ‘Well, you’re no saint and neither is your son. I don’t want you encouraging him. If he slips and falls into the river he’ll be swept away, like those poor children who drowned.’ She crossed herself hastily to prevent some passing demon turning her words into a prophecy.