The Heretic’s Wife (33 page)

Vaughan shouted after them, “Don’t forget, Master Gough, if you should see Frith or Tyndale, tell them I have an offer of pardon from the king.”

“Keep walking,” John whispered as they hurried toward the most crowded portion of the dock. “Pretend you don’t hear. Next he’ll be asking where we live.”

Somebody jostled her and stepped on the hem of her skirt. She felt it tear but kept up her pace. “John, he said
pardon
. . .” she said between breaths, “an offer of pardon from the king . . . maybe we should go back and—”

“Or maybe it’s just a trick,” he said. “Keep walking.”

A few minutes later they looked back to see that Stephen Vaughan had disappeared into the crowd, but John did not slacken his pace. Kate was beginning to get a stitch in her side, but she soon forgot about that discomfort. She stopped abruptly, almost causing him to stumble.

“My trunk, John,” she wailed. “All our things. What happened to the man with our trunk?”

“Don’t worry about your trunk. We may have been lucky to get out with our lives.”

Dusk had descended quickly and with it a chill that threatened frost. The foot traffic had lessened as well. Even the dockworkers had deserted, no doubt anxious to find a warm hearth. She pulled her cloak tightly around her, moaning inwardly—all her pretty things. Bad enough to start a new life among strangers, but with nothing but the clothes on your back!
Stop whining, Kate.
She tried to sound braver than she felt. “Do you know how to find the house we are to go to?” she asked.

“I was going to ask the captain,” he said ruefully, then looking around at the rapidly thinning crowds, “It’s probably not safe here after dark.”

“What does
Antwerpen Grote Markt
mean?” Kate asked, pointing to an arrow with the words burned into it.

“Town Square. That’s where the guild houses are. We’ll ask there for directions.”

By now they were a couple of furlongs from the docks. The dim outlines of the ships bobbed in the distance. She could no longer tell which one was the
Siren’s Song,
but it didn’t really matter. They turned in the direction of the pointing arrow, leaving the river behind them. At the end of a narrow, winding street, where the smells of cookfires and roasting meat mingled with the night smells of the river, a lantern beckoned on a lamppost.

As they headed for it, Kate heard footsteps keeping pace with them.

“John—”

“I know. I heard it too. Walk faster.”

“I can’t walk any faster.”

And just then, “Master Frith, wait up. I have your trunk.” It was the voice of the sailor who took their trunk.

“I have been trying to catch up to you. Captain said to follow you and see you get where you’re going. I almost lost you back there.”

If Kate had breath enough, she would have sighed with relief.

Endor’s body jerked as she slept on her pallet within the small enclosure in the bow of the ship. The dream was always the same.

She was running down the narrow alley that was Rottenhouse Row. Running hard. Breathless and afraid. They were behind her, gaining on her, their footsteps loud, loud, louder, pounding, pounding. Like her heart. Five of them.

There had been a sixth with them behind the tavern where she’d gone to deliver the bread. She saw the knife blade slice across his throat, heard the gurgle of his blood, watched in frozen horror as it spurted from his neck.

I won’t tell,
she cried.
I won’t tell,
as they grabbed her.
Ye won’t tell. Nay, witch, ye’ll not tell.
One bent her arm behind her back.
Please, please, let me go. I won’t tell.
But they raped her one by one, their brutish bodies smothering her, hurting her until she lay choking, gagging on her own shame and vomit, as the last one stuck a fist in her mouth and pulled on her tongue until
she feared he would rip its roots from her throat. But that was not his plan. One crude chop and another and another—as she struggled to wrench free while they held her—all with the same knife he’d used to kill the man. Then there was nothing left in the whole universe but the taste of rusty metal and blood and an agony that seared itself into her brain as surely as white-hot metal sears flesh.

She always woke trying to cry for help with words that could not form—only helpless, shame-filled moans.

It always took a minute, one breathless, terrible minute before she realized where she was, before she felt first the boards beneath her and soft wool blankets. Not in a ditch then, not lying in her own blood, the world fading around her, wondering when she’d last said confession, thinking she was going to hell for how could she confess without a tongue, thinking she already was in hell. One long minute thinking her heart would not beat again before she remembered. She was safe. She was in the enclosure that He had built for her. It was a blessed place—the only space she had ever owned.

It had only taken one week for the dream to find her there. But at least the waking was better. He had provided her a hammock like some of the crewmen slept in, but she preferred the nest of warm wool blankets on the floor. In her whole life she had never slept anywhere but on the floor or the ground, but she was glad for the hanging bunk. It made a good shelf to store her things. Though she could not see them in the darkness, it was good to know they were there: the bone-handled hairbrush given to her by her sister Meggie before she was sent away to work in the kitchens of the great house, a second shift, one spare blouse, and a cloak He had bought her for cold days. Her things—even the rags she used on her bleeding days folded neatly in the tin bucket she used for washing them—where nobody else would bother them. A private place. A safe place. With a door that latched.

The ship rocked gently now and then still sheltered in the harbor. Pulling her blanket up over her head, she curled herself into a ball, but knew sleep would not return this night. Her fingers groped for the amulet that always gave her comfort after the dream, and then she remembered. Saint Anne was gone; she had given her to the girl. The still water had shown her the girl needed it more. God had already given Endor a protector.

Endor. That was the name he’d given her when she followed him onto the boat.
Tell me your name,
he’d said, and of course she could not say,
Ella. My name is Ella.
He’d given her that little half-smile and said,
I shall call you
Endor.
Now she thought of her name as Endor. Endor had a protector. Ella did not. Ella was dead.

The night was still and cold. She opened the latch to let in the heat from the cook box, which sat just feet from her door. Its live coals banked in the ashes never went out. They would keep her warm on the coldest night. The ship was very quiet. The men had all gone to the tavern on the shore. She was glad. They would relieve their lust in the brothels. None ever approached her, but when they were at sea on the long runs to the eastern ports, sometimes she saw their hungry glances. She knew they thought she was bad luck, only suffered her because He made them—and because she baked good bread from the fine milled flour in the barrels below, flour destined for the kitchens of the noble and the powerful.

Through the crack in the door she could see the black sky reflected in the black sea. She could not tell where one stopped and the other began. Wrapping her blanket around her, she went out onto the deck. It was her favorite kind of night, moonless, crisp and clear. Great crowds of stars spangled a black sky. God must live on one of them, she thought. There had been no stars on the night Ella died. God was not watching.

In the ship’s quiet, the scurrying of little feet from the ship’s bowels where the cargo lay in boxes and crates seemed louder. But the rats did not frighten her like they had the girl. They were just more hungry creatures. Whenever one ventured into her enclosure, she beat it with her wooden clog until it returned to its place. Everything had a place. The enclosure was hers, and she would allow no intruders. Their appointed place was in the hold among the wooden barrels filled with fancy goods for the rich who did not pay the king’s taxes. If she closed her eyes she could hear their futile gnawing. They would not get into the iron-banded barrels, and it would take a heap of gnawing to get into the sewn canvas sacks. Most would have to be content with the tiny grains of spillage.

It was the way of all things.

But still the sound made her sad. It reminded her of Jemmy. Her brother used to catch the rats on the London docks and bring them home in a handmade cage he’d rigged. The money he made from selling them to the lord mayor’s chief rat catchers they used to buy bread. When there was no bread they ate the rats.

Jemmy had always looked out for her. He used to hold her hand when they were in the streets. The first thing she’d ever seen in the still water had been the portent of his death. Just a wee girl, maybe five or six summers, she
had looked into a puddle after a rain and seen the hangman’s noose. One week later they had hanged Jemmy with two other cutpurses. Ella had cried for two days, and she had learned the pictures in the water never lied. Endor wondered how long it would be before the girl or the man—she could not tell which, since she had only seen the stake—would meet her trial.

Kate wrinkled her nose as the woman opened the door to the upstairs rooms: one small sitting room, a garderobe, and a bedroom and all flooded with that wonderful watery light that hovered over the whole city. “It smells of turpentine,” she said to John. “But I guess we’ll get used to it. It’s clean and certainly has a bigger bed than we’re accustomed to.”

“That’s the only thing that makes it undesirable.” He grinned. “I don’t like the idea of even the possibility of so much space between us.”

“Shh,” Kate said, feeling herself blush as she looked at the austere woman who showed them the chamber.

The woman was the sister of the man who’d owned the studio. According to Mistress Poyntz, the hostess at the house where they had gone last night, he’d died right here in this room and less than a month gone.

“I’m not sure I’ll like living in a dead man’s studio—” Kate had started to protest when Mistress Poyntz had told them about the rooms early that morning, but Mistress Poyntz had tried to reassure her. “I’ve seen it. I’m sure you’ll be comfortable, my dear. It’s nice and spacious, good light—the brother was a very well known artist—and Catherine said she would put in a feather bed. It will just be temporary until somebody moves out of the English Merchants’ House. The English merchants never stay long. You can’t keep sleeping on pallets in the parlor as you did last night.”

Kate looked around the pretty chamber, thinking maybe she could put the idea out of her head after all. It was a nice room, nicer than her room had been above the print shop, nicer even than her room had been during her stay at the Walshes’.

“We’ll move the bed away from the windows over next to the easel where the sketches of that really ugly woman are displayed,” John said.

“John! The landlady will hear you. We can’t afford to insult her,” she said softly from the corner of her mouth. “Lady Poyntz says lodgings are very expensive here and this woman is accommodating us.”

“Don’t worry. She probably speaks only Flemish.” Then in a louder
voice, looking over Kate’s shoulder, “We’ll take it,” he said in English then repeated it in her language.

She answered something that sounded like gibberish to Kate and he fumbled in his pocket.

“You speak Flemish, too?” Kate asked in wonderment.

“After a fashion. It’s just Low German—not that different from Dutch.” He handed the woman one of their precious coins.

Kate sat on the settle beneath one of the wide windows and ran her hand across its bright cushions. “We should go back to the English Merchants’ House and get our trunk, I suppose.” She noticed a paint smear on the piping around the damask edging. Noticed too that the rooms were very well appointed for an artist’s studio. He must have been successful. She supposed ugly people wanted their portraits painted too.

Catherine, the woman who was to be their new landlady—Kate couldn’t remember her last name, started with an
M,
she thought—was rummaging in the cupboard. She brought out clean towels and a cake of Castilian soap, placed them on the table beside the bed.