The Raven's Head (31 page)

Gisa’s head jerks up. ‘This book tells you how to heal any condition? Even something physicians cannot cure? You are sure?’

Sylvain laughs again, for the expression on her face is one of undisguised hunger. ‘Though a man be already crossing from this life to the next, though he lies buried in his grave, what is written here will restore him to such perfect life and health as even the angels have never known.’

Gisa hurries along the path in the cold shadow of the wall of the manor grounds. She cannot escape the feeling that the stones will suddenly open like the panels in the Great Hall and she will be dragged back inside. It is only when the wall ends that she slows her pace. For a mile or so, she can breathe easily. There are no walls here. Only stunted birch scrub and willows flank the track and beyond them the red-gold glints of light from the setting sun as it catches the breeze-riffled water of the marsh pools.

But all too soon another wall looms up beside the track, separated from it by a water-filled ditch – the great, grim walls of Langley Abbey. Their shadow, too, stretches cold and dark across the track, oozing out towards the distant town, where the smoke from the hearth fires rises into the chill evening air.

Gisa hesitates. She has no wish to linger here, but no desire to return to her uncle’s house either. Aunt Ebba will be waiting on her throne of pillows, querulous, impatient, demanding to know every detail of the furnishings of the manor house with which she intends to regale the endless stream of goodwives who are ravenous for the smallest scrap of gossip. She will not believe Gisa if she tells her she does not enter the house.

‘Help me! Lady . . . help!’

The cry is so tremulous, so faint, that Gisa thinks she has mistaken the words for the call of some marsh bird. But it comes again. She spins round. She can see no one, but she’s certain it is a child’s voice. Is it coming from behind the abbey wall?

‘Who’s there? Come out where I can see you.’

She has heard tales of drowned souls or malicious spirits who call from the marsh pools to lure the living to their deaths. She does not quite believe them, but now, in this half-light . . .

‘Stuck . . . I’m stuck.’

The cry is coming from somewhere low down. Gisa walks along the lip of the water-filled ditch peering into the thick green water. She sees something and scurries towards a dark shape a few yards ahead, until it resolves itself into a rotting tree-trunk.

A tiny movement catches her eye. It is probably just a scrap of cloth fluttering in the breeze, yet she moves closer. The fingers of a child’s hand are poking out through a drainage hole between two massive stones in the base of the abbey wall. Gisa kneels on the edge of the ditch, leaning over as far as she dares.

‘What are you doing down there?’

‘Hid under the big vat . . . heard someone coming so I crawled down the hole where the water goes . . . into the tunnel . . . but there are lots of tunnels, full of mud and water . . . It was dark, so dark . . . saw light . . . but hole’s too small . . . can’t get out.’

The child’s teeth are chattering violently. Gisa can see little of the boy’s muddy face, but what she can see is smeared with streaks of blood, as is his hand. He is hurt, though she can’t tell how badly.

‘Can you find your way back to the hole you climbed into?’

‘It’s dark . . . don’t want to go back into the dark and—’

‘I’ll get help.’ Gisa begins to struggle to her feet. ‘I’ll fetch the White Canons. They must know other entrances to the drainage tunnels beneath their abbey. They’ll soon have you out.’

‘No, no!’ the boy sobs. ‘They’ll kill me. Don’t tell. Please don’t tell.’

She does not believe anyone would kill the child, but there is no mistaking the abject terror in his voice. Something terrible must have happened to drive a little boy to hide himself down there, something that the child is far more afraid of than the dark.

‘Hush now. I won’t tell anyone, I promise. But we’ll have to think of some other way of getting you out. Stay by the hole. I’ll fetch you some food and . . .’

And what? What else can she bring to help him? The boy needs warmth. His wounds will need tending, too, else cold and wet will kill him in hours. She must fetch an iron crow as well, or something she can use to prise out one of the stones. There is no such tool in her uncle’s shop, but she’s seen one in the blacksmith’s forge. If she could take it while he is at supper . . .

‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ she promises. ‘Do you have a name, so I can call to you when I come?’

She can barely make out the whispered sob of his reply.

‘P-Peter.’

He should avoid having anything to do with princes and nobles.

I limped into the market square, trying to walk on the heel of my left leg. The ball of my foot, where the nail had gone in, was hot and painful. The whole foot was beginning to swell alarmingly. I needed a good physician to draw the poison from it. A night spent sleeping in a leaking goat byre, which was the most luxurious shelter I could find, had left me cold, aching and in a foul humour.

But my mood was slightly lifted by seeing that I had arrived in Langley on market day. Now, I do enjoy a lively market, not that I’d gone to many when I was walled up in old Gaspard’s turret, but as a child in Winchester I’d loved watching the jugglers and dancing bears, dark-skinned merchants in their colourful robes and pink-cheeked fisher-girls prising open their oysters to tempt goodwives with the plump, glistening flesh. Every way you turned you’d catch a whiff of something different – exotic spices and roasting pork, perfumed Castile soap and fresh peaches. But the market at Langley held no such excitement.

It reeked of necessity not pleasure, of cabbage not cinnamon. In one corner, faded women were selling off whatever they could spare from their tofts, a couple of threadbare chickens, a few onions or some dried peas scooped up in wooden bowls and trickled into a sack held by some gimlet-eyed hag, who would shriek as though she was being ravished if she thought her measure short by so much as one withered pea. Butchers proffered hunks of meat so dry I’d have sworn they’d been trying to sell the same piece for a month.

The salmon and cod fish smelt none too fresh either and even the carp gasping in their barrels of green water looked ready to hurl themselves on the ground to end their misery. There were a few beasts on sale, mostly unwanted billy kids or cows and goats that had ceased giving milk, but there was scarcely enough meat on their sharp bones to feed the most ascetic of hermits.

The most animated section of the market was occupied by the craftsmen and those who had sailed their tiny craft downriver to Langley from the neighbouring villages. They shouted their wares, proclaiming the cheapness of their threads and needles, axe heads and knives, pots and pails, oxen yokes and leather belts. All sturdy and serviceable, but fashioned without any attempt to decorate them, and I could see why: the few goodwives and men who rooted about the stalls were as dully clad and unadorned as the pails and beakers they were haggling for. There were only two qualities the Langley folk considered – would it stand up to hard wear and was it cheap? They’d no money to waste on anything as frivolous as beauty.

The wooden box rocked beneath my cloak. Lugh was growing restless.

‘You’re right,’ I murmured. ‘There doesn’t look to be a man in these parts with spirit enough to get a nun with child, or a wife with the energy to care about it if he did. As soon as I find someone to tend my foot, I’m off to find a town with more life about it, for where there’s life there’s scandal.’

What I should have done, of course, was to heed the warning of the Seven Whistlers and hobble out of Langley just as fast as my one and a half feet could carry me, but if the beetle could see the boot about to descend on it, it wouldn’t hang around waiting to get crushed. So, fool that I was, I limped up to a goodwife who was dragging a small tow-haired child by one hand and a skeletal cow by the other and enquired politely if there was a competent physician in the town.

She studied me for an age, her eyes narrowed, as if she was weighing up the merits of the numerous physicians Langley had to offer. The child and cow tugged her fretfully in different directions, but she ignored them. ‘You don’t want to waste time on physicians. They only send you to fetch physic from the apothecary. May as well go to him straight off. That way you’ll not be charged twice.’ She jerked her chin towards the street that ran off the square. ‘Try the apothecary up yonder street. He’s a good ’un. Saint, if you ask me. What he has to put up with from his wife would drive most men to murder. Most husbands would have sent her packing long since and got themselves a new woman, one as could cook and clean, instead of lying about expecting to be waited on.’

Now that the woman had started, she was like a broached keg. The gossip flowed out of her and I began to fear I’d never get away.

‘Course, he used to have his niece to help him. Quiet little thing she was, plain as pease pottage.’

I thought this a trifle unkind, given that the straggle-haired gossip had a face that resembled a badly carved gargoyle. ‘My thanks,’ I said, turning away to face the street she’d shown me.

But she was far from done talking. She’d sold me her knowledge, and she was determined I should pay the price by listening. She stepped in front of me so that I was hemmed in by woman, cow and child.

‘I was telling you about the girl. Queer affair, if you ask me.’

I hadn’t, but she ignored that minor point. She leaned closer. Her breath smelt of onion and, for some inexplicable reason, wet dog.

‘This niece of his is working up at the manor. But the old baron’s only ever had manservants in the manor for as long as anyone can recall. A woman’s not stepped over the threshold since his wife ran off and left him. Not that any women from these parts would venture near him. Cruel as the east wind, so they say. But now, after years of keeping away from townsfolk, the old baron’s sent for the apothecary’s niece to work for him, if you ever heard of such a thing. And what does he want with her? That’s what I’d like to know. Whatever it is, it can’t be decent, for the girl has told her aunt Ebba nothing about what she gets up to in the manor, save he asks her to grind and mix things.

‘“What things?” Ebba asks the girl.

‘“Herbs,” the girl says.

‘“Is he setting up his own apothecary shop now?” she asks the girl.

‘But the girl tells her aunt she doesn’t know.’ The woman snorts in disbelief. ‘How can she not know what’s she’s mixing? And if there’s mixing to be done, why can’t one of his manservants do it? Course, I reckon Ebba encouraged the girl to make sheep’s eyes at him in the hopes he’d wed her. Ebba’s always been one to hanker after roast swan when anyone else would be grateful for a bite of boiled chicken. But it stands to reason, a man as wealthy as the baron wouldn’t wed a girl like that, especially when her father . . . Well, you know what they say about her father.’

I didn’t, but at that moment I was far more interested in the wealthy baron than some penniless girl’s father. In fact, I was so interested that the throbbing in my foot had almost vanished. Curiosity is better than any apothecary’s draught for relieving pain.

‘You said this man’s wife ran off? Who with?’

The woman gave me an impatient glare, as if I’d entirely missed the point of what she was telling me.

‘Osle doesn’t like folks enquiring into his business and he’s not a man you’d want to go annoying.’

‘Osle – is that the baron’s name?’

She glanced around furtively, lowering her voice to a whisper. ‘Sylvain’s his name, but there’re some names as are best forgotten.’ She tugged at the child’s hand. ‘Come along now, don’t dawdle, there’s a heap of things want doing at home.’ She jerked the cow and child forward, as if they’d been delaying her. ‘You want to plough a wide furrow round Osle, you do. Wide as you’d plough round the devil himself.’

But I had no intention of ploughing any furrow, unless it was straight to this baron’s door.

I found the apothecary’s shop by following my nose. The pungent scent of dried herbs and tallow trickled out through the shutter, which had been lowered into the street to form the counter. A tired-looking, grey-haired man was leaning over it, handing a jar to an old woman, who was cupping her ear the better to hear his instructions. He repeated them several times, but finally she abandoned the attempt to understand. She heaved her drooping dugs round in the direction of the marketplace and the rest of her body waddled after them.

The apothecary gazed after her, sorrowfully shaking his head. ‘She hasn’t understood a word of what I told her to do with the unguent. And she refuses to bring her daughter with her to help her. You’ll see, she’ll be back next week complaining it’s done her no good.’

He seemed suddenly to realise he was addressing himself to a stranger and peered at me anxiously, as if I might take his comments amiss. I explained about the injury to my foot. He regarded me warily, as if trying to decide whether this might be some trick, but when I started to take off my shoe in the street, he finally nodded. ‘You’d better come inside and let me look.’

There seemed to be a great many bolts to be drawn before the door was opened, then fastened again as soon as I’d limped through. The shop was small, and so dark I could barely make out the shapes of the jars and bottles on the highest shelves and was forced to duck beneath bundles of herbs and twigs swinging from the beams. An ancient yellow thigh bone of some animal lay on the table, beside a bowl of dried mice, another of desiccated worms and some shrivelled black things that looked as if they might be the dried hearts or livers of hares or cats.

The apothecary led the way to the rear of the shop, where a rough-hewn bench had been placed before a tiny window that overlooked the yard at the back.

‘Please sit and remove the shoe.’

I plucked at the laces around my ankle till they were loose enough to slide the shoe off. Once free of the constraints, the throbbing intensified and my foot felt as if it was swelling so fast, I wondered if I’d get the shoe back on.