The Owl Killers (55 page)

None of my graves survived until spring. I’d watched them all fade away. Tiny insubstantial things, they none of them outlasted my grief. Stone babies without a name, without a voice, without a breath. They fled from me, slipping out in a scalding torrent of pain and blood as if they could not bear to be inside me a moment longer. Little fish escaping back to the river. I tried to hold on to them, even when I could feel them escaping. Each time, when the blood began to flow, I knew I had lost them, but still I tried to hold them inside me. But they knew I was not fit to be their mother and they wouldn’t stay. They didn’t want me.

I remembered a face. I’d slept—the midwife had given me some opiate—and I woke to see a face floating above me, so distant, so blurred I could only make out the eyes and mouth, but I knew it was my baby’s face, so like my husband’s, his eyes, his mouth. He would be overjoyed to have a son who favoured him. The mouth moved and I thought my child cried for me. I stretched out my arms to hold him and felt a stinging slap striking my hands away.

“Don’t touch me, Wife. There shall be no more embraces between us. Yet another born before its time. I might almost think you had taken some pernicious potion to rob me of my sons for spite, but the physician says it is your wanton lust that kills them. It’s your overheated blood which poisons them. Do you pleasure yourself, Wife, or satiate your appetites in another’s bed? For as God is my witness I have taken every care not to arouse you. You are a whore and it’s well you have not borne a child, for you are not fit to be a mother.”

Once the blood is washed from the linen, people say you never had a child. See that woman over there whose infant lived a few months
then died? She has the right to cry and mourn and be comforted. She is to be pitied, but what do you know of losing a child? But I did, I did. They were my children no less than those who drew breath and I cried for them, for I had cuddled them inside me. They had drawn nourishment and life from me. I had felt them swell and move, my secret children. I felt them quicken and kick. I had nursed their life. But no one would let me grieve for them, my nameless ones. They were dismissed from life as easily as phantasms born of the moon-crazed. They were buried as carelessly as menstrual rags.

I used to sit at the window of my house in Flanders looking down on the waterfront. For hours I’d watch the men loading and unloading the barrels of wine, baskets of herring, and bales of cloth. Shouted greetings and bellowed orders, cries of sellers and seagulls were carried upwards to my open window on a rich current of sea salt, leather, spices, and sweat. I’d see the women waddling past, one hand pressed to aching backs, the other cradling bellies stuffed full as pomegranates with new life. I’d hear the squeals of children daring each other to run between the legs of horses or climb up on stacks of teetering bales. I’d watch them swing from ships’ ropes and play tag along the very edge of the quay, while their mothers gossiped or haggled with merchants, indifferent to the danger.

Why them and not me? How could that whore Osmanna, that blood-smeared bitch, swell with child from some filthy groping with a drooling stableboy, when I, who had never once betrayed my marriage bed, remained barren? I would have made a dozen pilgrimages on my knees for just one of the infants that sluts like her spat out like grape seeds into the mud. I would have doted on my child, never letting it out of my sight, alert to every kind of peril, attentive to every need. Why should other women burst open every year, pushing out a healthy lusty infant with no more effort than a sow, when I couldn’t manage to produce even
one?

But I know now. I know why I could not have a child. My husband and Servant Martha were right: I was not fit to be a mother. I had pleaded and implored and worn God down until He had finally granted me a child of my own. And just like all of those careless mothers I had condemned, I’d let her run straight into danger.

But there wouldn’t have been any danger if Servant Martha hadn’t turned the priest and villagers against us. If she’d given them the relic, they wouldn’t have taken my Gudrun. But she wouldn’t, because she wanted them to kill my child. Servant Martha didn’t want me to love little Gudrun, because she can’t love anyone. She didn’t want me to have a child. She and Osmanna, they both murdered my babies. They don’t want me to have anything that I can call mine.

THE IRON RING ON THE DOOR
turned and I braced myself against it, holding it shut.

“Beatrice, are you there?” Catherine called out.

The handle jiggled again. Catherine never had the strength to push open the door easily, even without a body as weighty as mine leaning against it.

“Beatrice, Servant Martha wants you.”

Servant Martha mustn’t come in here. I jerked open the door. Catherine fell into my arms. I pushed her back out of the doorway and closed it behind me.

“What does she want?”

“There are men with Servant Martha. The same ones who took Osmanna.” Catherine shivered and looked up at me, her forehead wrinkled in concern. “I heard them say they were taking you to testify against Osmanna, but you won’t, will you?”

A wave of nausea and irritation rolled over me. “I have to look after the pigeons. Tell Servant Martha, tell her I have to look after the pigeons.”

“They’re taking Servant Martha to the trial too.”

“Trial?”

“Beatrice,” Catherine wailed, “you know Osmanna was arrested because of what you … They are putting her on trial. But, Beatrice, you won’t say anything, will you?” She clutched at my arm, peering anxiously up at me.

“It’s a sin to tell lies, Catherine. Ask Servant Martha. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou shalt not … speak.”

w
E WAITED IN THE CHURCH
, pressed side by side on the assortment of small narrow benches and stools brought down from the Manor and carried in from any cottage that still had a stick of furniture worthy of the name. Braziers had been lit inside the church and the air was stifling, fetid with dung-caked shoes, wet wool, wood smoke, and stale sweat. The thick yellow flames of the tallow candles curdled the faces of the people, souring clothes of red, green, and brown to a single hue of rancid butter. The tallows added their own oily fumes to the stench. Father Ulfrid was clearly not going to waste good wax candles on this affair, for who knew how many might be burned before this trial was over.

Two ornate empty chairs, flanked by several lesser ones, stood upon a dais before the altar. They were empty. The Bishop’s Commissarius was dining with Robert D’Acaster and Father Ulfrid. So the villagers were obliged to kick their heels and wait until their masters had finished filling their bellies. I had no doubt they would be well filled, for D’Acaster would want a good report made to the Bishop. There was no sign of Osmanna. But a small gap had been left in front of the dais that no one had filled, a hexed circle in which none dared tread.

All around, the men—for they were mostly men—fidgeted, farted, laughed, and gossiped, waiting for the play to begin.

Beatrice was seated beside me. She had not said a word to me since we left the beguinage. Her eyes were clouded as if her spirit inhabited some distant place. I had tried to convince Father Ulfrid that she was not well enough to testify, but the more I argued, the more determined he seemed to bring her.

I had managed just a few whispered words alone with Beatrice, cautioning her to say as little as possible. I warned her that if anything should come to light about the Masses we had conducted, her life would be in danger no less than mine. I hoped that would be enough
to bring her to her senses and make her guard her tongue, but I could not be sure. She would not even look at me.

I knew it wasn’t Osmanna’s blood that Father Ulfrid wanted: It was mine. The Church would try to use her to trap me. It was not just Osmanna who was on trial here—it was the whole beguinage. I could only pray Beatrice understood that.

The crowd stirred as the church door was flung open and their masters entered. A few made halfhearted attempts to stand and make small ungainly bows as D’Acaster passed through the crowd, but most kept their seats.

Robert D’Acaster’s face was shiny and dripping with perspiration as if he was carved of melting tallow. His foot missed the step of the dais; for a moment he teetered between falling backwards and tipping headfirst onto the dais. Phillip D’Acaster hastily grabbed him and hoisted him up. He flopped down into one of the carved chairs, which visibly bowed under his weight. Dinner had evidently been washed down with large quantities of wine.

Father Ulfrid took one of the lesser chairs on the dais, while the other great carved chair was occupied by a man who looked as if he had dined on nothing but dried bread and bitter herbs. At first glance he seemed to be an aged man, with dark hollow eyes, and sharp cheekbones. Even his gestures were ancient, as if he had sat for many years in some great debating chamber or in a library poring over books, but on closer inspection, I could see that he was no more than thirty, probably a deal younger.

The man crushed on the other side of me on the narrow bench elbowed me in the ribs. “That’s Bishop’s man, that is. You want to watch him. They say he caught his own brother lying with a man and he witnessed against him. Then he watched while they sliced off his brother’s nose and ears. What kind of bastard would do that to one of his own?”

The Bishop’s Commissarius gathered his fur-trimmed gown closely about him as if he feared a draught, though no one could possibly have been cold in that church, unless he had iced water in his veins instead of blood.

The crowd began murmuring again as the door opened for a second time and Osmanna was led in by a rope bound around her wrists.
Some of the villagers hissed. Others crossed themselves and drew back as she was led between the benches, as if they thought she might have some contagion.

Osmanna stared straight ahead of her. She was pale, but two unnaturally bright spots of colour stained her cheeks. She was not wearing her beguine’s cloak. Without it, she looked fragile and vulnerable. Wisps of straw clung to her skirts. Her long hair was loose and tangled as it had been that day I first saw her in her father’s house.

A venomous murmur swelled up around the room as if a swarm of bees was gathering. Phillip D’Acaster leant forward, regarding Osmanna with an undisguised leer as he might look at a tavern wench. Clearly, the sight of a young girl bound and dishevelled aroused the basest of desires in him. I felt sick with disgust.

The Bishop’s Commissarius swept his gaze around the room and all fell silent. He nodded to his clerk, sitting at a small writing desk below the dais. If the Commissarius was young, his clerk was still younger, scarcely out of clouts, with the pimples of youth sprouting fresh upon his face. He was hastily slicing quill after quill as if he thought he would be called upon to copy out the whole Bible before the afternoon was out.

The Commissarius coughed impatiently. This only made his poor clerk start violently like a birched schoolboy, sending his quills rolling to the floor. A rough gale of laughter ripped through the room as he scrambled to retrieve them.

The Commissarius looked slowly from Beatrice to me and back again. Then he unfurled a ringed finger and beckoned to me. I stood.

“Mistress, I judge you to be the leader of the women, the one they call the Servant Martha, is that correct?”

I nodded, trying to steady my breathing.

The Commissarius turned to D’Acaster. “She will not be required to swear an oath, for she is excommunicated and the lips of the damned shall not be permitted to blaspheme the name of God. Such persons may not bear witness against a godly man, but against other malefactors they may be heard, for the Devil will denounce his own.”

He turned back to me, jerking his chin up as if he was about to order a scullion to empty a pot.

“Mistress, we solemnly charge you to speak the truth before us this
day, lest you find yourself under the sentence of this court, if indeed any woman so lost to the mercy and grace of our blessed Lord is capable of distinguishing truth from falsehood.”

“Commissarius,” I replied, “we are ever mindful that our blessed Lord is witness to all our discourse in both light matters and grave, in private and in public; therefore we speak the truth by custom. Unlike some, we need no oath to chasten us to do so.”

I could hear collective intake of breath from the villagers behind me. Father Ulfrid stirred, as if to speak, but the Commissarius silenced him with a raised hand without taking his eyes from mine.

“I sincerely pray for your sake that it is so, Mistress. Very well, let us begin.” He turned to the clerk. “You may record that no oath was taken, therefore her words are to be accorded little weight.”