The Gallows Curse by Karen Maitland

  Osborn jerked his head in Athan's direction. You, boy, are you the baby's father?'

  Athan twitched rather than nodded, his face stricken with anguish, but Osborn took the movement for assent.

  'Have you anything to say in this girl's defence? Did you give her permission to take your son to this cunning woman?'

  Athan stared from his mother to Elena, his mouth working convulsively. Silent tears began running down his cheeks. He made a desperate gesture, holding out his arms as if he was reaching for Elena.

  'I'm sorry, so sorry,' he whispered. 'I love you . . . even if. . . I'll never stop loving you.'

  Then he bolted for the door, shoving through the servants clustered around it, and fled out into the sunlight.

  Osborn raised his eyebrows. 'I think we can take that as a no. So we'd better proceed to sentence.'

  'But surely,' Raffaele protested, 'Elena should have the chance to prove her innocence?'

  'How exactly do you propose she does that, Master Raffaele? She cannot produce the living child, nor the woman to whom she says she entrusted him.'

  'We could wait and question Gytha when she returns.'

  Elena felt a surge of hope leap up in her, and she fixed her eyes on Osborn's face, praying that he would agree.

  Osborn snorted. 'You should pay more attention to your own eloquent testimony, Master Raffaele. Was it not you who told us that this cunning woman had taken her infirm mother and all her possessions with her? Plainly she has no intention of returning to Gastmere, which leaves us with the problem of what do with the girl. If this land were not under the Pope's Interdict, then she could be tried by the ordeal of water or fire and I would not have had to waste a good day's hunting over this matter. But since, thanks to the Pope, there is not a priest left to administer the oath, I must be the judge of her innocence or guilt. By order of our beloved sovereign King John, I am commanded to keep the king's peace in these parts and see that those who break it are justly punished. The girl will hang at first light tomorrow.'

  He delivered the last sentence in such a matter of fact tone, as if he was giving orders for his horse to be groomed, that Elena couldn't grasp what he had said.

  'Wait!' A voice rang out from the minstrels' gallery at the far end of the hall. Everyone turned and stared upwards. Lady Anne was gripping the gallery rail.

  'It is the Church's teaching, is it not, that an infant who dies before baptism is not counted a human creature for he has no soul? Therefore a woman who does away with her newborn child before baptism is not guilty of murder.'

  Osborn smiled the smile of a torturer who revels in his work.

  'How gracious of you to take an interest, Lady Anne. But as I was just explaining to my steward here, who like you seems to be woefully ignorant of such matters, we are suffering under an Interdict. Who knows how long it will be before children may be baptized again? Why, these babes may be men themselves by then, and are we to say that if they are then murdered their killers should go unpunished?

  'And please, mistress, do not waste my time in pleading that the girl was acting in a fit of melancholy and did not know what she did. On her own admission she had been dreaming about committing this crime for months, even torturing her poor mother-in-law by openly threatening it. But even if that was not the case, I am not punishing her for murder alone.'

  Osborn turned a faintly amused glance on Raffaele, as if he was deriving a great deal of pleasure from Lady Anne's challenge. 'I take it neither this girl nor her husband were born freemen. They both are villeins?'

  Raffe nodded dejectedly.

  'Then the dead child was a villein also and as such belonged to the manor. This girl has not only deliberately murdered her own baby, but in doing so has destroyed manor property, my property, mistress. The death of a midden brat does not concern me overmuch, but the loss of a future workman does, not to mention the generations of villeins he might have fathered. By rights I should hang her twice, once for murder and again for theft. But I am inclined to show mercy. I will merely hang her once. That will suffice. Take the girl away and lock her up till morning.'

  Someone was screaming. Elena didn't know if it was herself or her mother who was shrieking, for her legs buckled under her and she crumpled senseless to the ground.

  9th Day after the New Moon,

  June 1211

  Bluebells — Some call them Deadmen's bells, for a mortal who hears a bluebell ring is listening to his own death knell.

  A bluebell wood is the most enchanted place on earth and mortals should never venture there alone for it is full of faerie spells. A child who picks bluebells alone will vanish, never to be seen again. An adult will be pixie-led and wander round and round in circles, unable to escape the wood, until he dies of exhaustion, unless someone should find him and lead him safely home.

  There is a game that mortal children play in innocence, laughing as they weave through each other. In and out the dusty bluebells. . . they sing ... I am your master. They should not play such dangerous games so lightly or wantonly, for the master they name is none other than the Faerie King himself who will lead them on a merry dance from which there is no return to this life.

  The Mandrake's Herbal

  Retribution

  Raffaele grasped Elena's arm so hard she thought he would snap the bone. He tugged her towards the open metal grill in the floor of the undercroft beneath the Great Hall.

  'Down there,' he ordered, indicating the rickety wooden ladder which plunged into the dark pit below. Raffaele held up his lantern to illuminate the first rungs. Although the sun had not yet set, in the far corner of the undercroft behind the kegs and barrels it was already dark. Elena peered down. The pit was twice as deep as a man's height. The bailiff stood at the bottom, staring up at her, holding up a short iron chain which was fastened at one end to the wall, while from the other end of the chain dangled an open iron collar. The flame from his lantern flickered across the beaten earth floor covered with dirty straw, and over the stone walls green and slimy from the damp. A stench of decay rose up on the cold, wet air that seemed to come from an open grave. Elena shuddered, trying to pull away.

  'No, please don't put me down there, please, I beg you.' She turned desperately to Raffaele. 'You could chain me up here in the cellar.'

  'And have you rescued?' Raffaele said harshly. 'You choose, you can either climb down that ladder yourself or I'll throw you down, and I can promise you lying there with broken bones will be a thousand times worse.'

  Raffaele was holding her so close to the edge that she knew the slightest flexing of his arm would send her crashing down. The violent way he had dragged her from the Great Hall left her in no doubt that he was angry enough to do it. In the Hall he had seemed to be on her side, the only one who believed her. She couldn't understand why he had turned against her. Did he too now believe what Joan had said?

  Shakily Elena climbed down the ladder and offered no resistance when the bailiff pushed her against the wall and bolted the iron collar around her neck.

  'You'll be in good company down here.' The bailiff inclined his head towards a rough stone wall on one side of the cell. 'Sir Gerard's mouldering behind there. You'd best make friends with his corpse; you'll soon be one yourself.'

  He tugged hard on the chain, to test the fastening, jerking the collar so that it bruised her throat, almost choking her. 'Not that you'll be resting in some fancy leaded coffin. Osborn'll have your body hanged in a gibbet cage till you've rotted away to bones, then they'll pound them to pieces and toss them in the marsh. And good riddance too, that's what I say. Nowt more evil creature on this earth than a woman who murders her own innocent bairn; 'gainst all nature, that is.'

  Satisfied the chain was secure, he picked up his lantern and started up the ladder.

  As the shadows rose up from the floor around her, Elena cried out, 'Leave me the light, for pity's sake.'

  The bailiff paused at the top of the ladder and laughed. 'What do you need a light for, girl
, there's nowt to see, save the rats and old Gerard's ghost when he comes for you.'

  Raffaele's fist struck as swiftly as a viper's fangs, catching the bailiff on the side of the head and almost sending him crashing back into the pit.

  'Sir Gerard to you, you son of a whore. And don't ever let me hear you speak of his ghost in front of her ladyship.'

  But the next minute Raffaele was reaching out his hand and hauling the stunned bailiff up on to the floor of the cellar as if he was his closest friend.

  'Come on, man, there's a flagon of wine waiting for us in the Hall. Leave this murdering witch to the rats. With any luck, they'll finish her and spare us the trouble of a hanging'

  The two men hauled the ladder up through the hatch. The iron grill slammed shut and Elena saw the glow of their lantern light grow fainter as they walked away. At least they hadn't closed the wooden trapdoor on top of it; she couldn't bear to think of being sealed in as if she was in ... a coffin.

  She was to die. She knew it and yet such a thing didn't seem possible. She couldn't make herself grasp the reality of it. In a few brief hours she would be dead, sent to the next world, and then what? Torment and torture without any end, like those pictures on the church wall of men and women being forced into the flames, boiling helplessly in cauldrons, their limbs hacked off or pierced with knives. She found herself retching in fear. No, no, she couldn't think of it, she mustn't think.

  She crouched on the damp, mouldy straw in the corner of the tiny cell. Even had she not been chained to the wall, she would have crouched against it, too terrified to let go of the solidness of it and drown in the nothingness beyond. She had never known darkness so thick, so complete, as if she had been blinded.

  She strained, trying to hear any rustling in the straw, but she could hear nothing except her own heart pounding. She tried desperately not to think of the corpse lying no more than a foot away, behind the loose rocks. Would she hear the coffin lid grate open?

  Only yesterday she was stirring Athan's supper over their fire and now she was here, and they meant to hang her. They couldn't. It wasn't possible. She was innocent. Didn't they understand she'd given her child away to keep him safe? They must believe her. Gytha would return before morning. She'd tell them the baby was alive. Gytha must come back and tell them. She must.

  Elena drew her legs up to her chin, wrapping her arms tightly about them and resting her head on the wall behind. Suddenly aware of the burning throbbing of her breasts, bursting with the milk her son would never drink, she tried to ease them, but they hurt so much she could hardly bear to touch them. She was so tired. She had not slept at all last night and all she wanted to do now was to sink into the oblivion of sleep, but if she did, then her last few hours of life would be gone and the morning would come instantly before she had time to prepare herself. If she could stay awake she could somehow stretch out those hours and give Gytha time to return.

  She must pray. She must say the words that would save her from the fires of hell. But she couldn't remember what the dying were supposed to say. Maybe she'd never known. It had been three years since the churches had been open for services and she couldn't recall any of the words the priests had recited. She always said her prayers, of course, for things that no priest would ever pray — Make Athan love me. But those were her words, not the right words, not the Latin words, and she knew only the magic words of the priests had the power to save a person from hell.

  Holy Virgin, Holy Mother, save me. But Mary was a mother, a good mother. She hadn't dreamt of killing her son. Was the Holy Virgin as disgusted with her as her own mam was? Would she refuse to listen because Elena was in her heart a murderer? To think about doing something, the village priest had once told her, was as wicked as actually doing it. It was the same sin. She had murdered her baby, because she had thought about murdering him, over and over again. She was guilty.

  She holds the baby dangling from her hands, like a dead rabbit. The scarlet blood from his head is dripping down on to a piece of white cloth. The fat drops of blood spread out on the cloth, merging into one another, until the white is lost entirely. Now the cloth is as red as hawthorn berries, as if it had always been red. Her rage has slowly trickled away with the dripping blood and now she is staring at the tiny corpse, unable to believe what she has done. Not believing that she has done it. She knows she must have done it. She knows she wanted to. She was consumed by hatred, burning up with the desire to smash, to hurt, to destroy. But she doesn't remember killing him.

  All she knows is that she is holding the dead infant and she is alone. Her legs give way and she falls to her knees, the baby drops from her grasp on to the bloody cloth. She turns and vomits. Shakily she wipes her mouth on the back of her hand, and when she turns back, the baby is lying there, looking up at her with wide blue eyes which do not blink. His soft lips are parted as if he has opened them to suckle, but no breath comes from them.

  She hadn't meant to hurt him. That's all she can think. She hadn't meant to do it. She hears a creaking, a door opening behind her. She whirls round.

  The iron ring caught her hard across the throat as she moved, jerking her awake with a cry of pain. Something was creaking open, something was grating towards her. She heard the sound of rasping breath. Elena sensed something moving beside her — the wall, the stones, were they being pushed outward? Was Gerard's corpse . . . ? She screamed.

  'Be quiet, girl, do you want to wake the whole manor?' a boy's voice whispered from the dark.

  Then came the faint glow of a lantern muffled beneath a cloak and she realized the wooden ladder was sliding down towards her. Minutes later the wood groaned under the weight of a heavy man descending cautiously into the pit.

  Raffaele set the lantern down and reached out towards her. She was certain he was going to hurt her, probably rape her. She kicked and pushed him, struggling away from his long fingers until she was choking on the iron collar. She tried to scream again, but his hand clamped hard across her mouth. . 'Stop struggling, you little idiot,' Raffaele whispered. 'What are you kicking me for? Can't you see I've come to help you? But there isn't much time. They'll come for you at dawn and you must be long gone by then. We have to hurry. Now, will you promise to stay quiet?'

  She nodded and he slowly withdrew his hand from her mouth and reached for a key in his scrip. Clumsily he tried to unlock the collar. Cursing her, he thrust the lantern into her hand. 'Here, hold it up so that I can see, and stay still.'

  Dumbly she did as she was bid and moments later he was climbing the ladder and ordering her to follow. He helped her over the edge of the pit, then grabbed her wrist and dragged her through the darkened undercroft, weaving through the barrels and past the cart until they reached the archway leading into the courtyard. There he paused, peering out.

  It could not be too far off dawn now, for torches intended to illuminate the courtyard were almost burnt away. Raffaele had timed it well. Crushing her between himself and the wall, he hurried her round the edge of the courtyard until they reached the huge bossed gate. The shutter on the window of the tiny gate lodge lay open, and from inside came the sound of pig-heavy snores.

  Raffaele bent close to Elena. 'Here, take your scrip and your cloak, you'll need them. As soon as I open the door, you run. Run for the ditch on the other side of the track. Hide and wait for me there. Don't move, understand?'

  He pushed her into position next to the opening of the small wicket gate set into the large, imposing manor gate. As carefully as he could, he eased up the beam and pulled the door towards him, but not quietly enough. A hound leapt up, barking furiously, straining at its chain. There was a grunt and a curse, as inside the gatehouse old Walter struggled off his cot. All at once every hound in the manor took up the cry of the guard dogs. Raffaele pushed Elena through the gate and slammed it behind her.

  Elena picked up her skirts and ran stumbling and tripping across the grass over the cart-rutted track and towards the ditch on the other side. She could hear shouts and bar
ks from behind the manor wall. Desperately she tried to look for some hiding place, but between the manor and the ditch there was only a line of slender birch trees and bushes that would not hide a rabbit, never mind a woman. She crouched behind them praying the darkness would cover what the trees would not.

  Every sense was screaming at her to run, but he'd said to wait. She must wait, but for how long? Why didn't he come? It would soon be dawn and as soon as the light began to creep over the marshes, she'd have no hope of escape. She must go now before it was too late.

  She tensed herself and stepped out from behind the trees, but instantly drew back again as the huge manor door swung open. Raffaele strode through, but he was not alone. Four men stumbled out after him, still rubbing the sleep from their eyes, and hard on their heels came two more who held the leashes of two pairs of hounds. The dogs were almost choking themselves on their collars as they strained forward, sniffing excitedly at the ground. The hounds were searching for her scent. Almost vomiting with fear, Elena looped the leather strap of her scrip over her neck and scrambled towards the ditch behind her. She dropped into it, trying to smother a cry as the cold water rose to her thighs. She crouched down till she was neck-deep in the stinking water and huddled into the reeds.