Master Thankless laughed. ‘I would never have thought so, lad.’
Gabriel lowered his voice. ‘Also, I worry in case those two villains come back for her.’
‘Why would they?’ I asked.
‘Because Hester is the only witness to what they have been up to,’ said Master Thankless.
‘No, she is not,’ I said. ‘There is Joan, the cook. She must have seen it all.’
Master Thankless put his hand on my arm. ‘Coriander, Joan is dead.’
‘How? Of what?’ I asked.
‘She fell down the stairs,’ said Master Thankless.
‘Pushed, more likely,’ said Gabriel. ‘That’s what I mean. I think they would kill Hester if they thought they could get away with it.’
It was hard to take in what he was saying. I was still shocked at hearing of Joan’s death.
After that Gabriel was allowed to keep Hester company while I took his place in the shop. Soon Hester began to eat again and the colour came back to her cheeks.
Gabriel took great delight in bringing Hester all sorts of gifts and little oddments he had found. Hester kept them by her bed and treasured even the smallest. I think she had never been given a present in her life before.
‘Was it Hester who told you what had happened to me?’ I asked Master Thankless one evening as we worked late getting a gown ready for one of his customers.
‘Yes, in the end, but to begin with it was Mistress Danes,’ said the tailor. ‘She came straight to me after Arise had thrown her out of the house. She was in a terrible state and I could make neither head nor tail of what she was telling me, other than that she was worried sick for you and intended to find Master Hobie to tell him what was going on. I did my best to persuade her to stay, and told her she could live here, but she said that was impossible: there was not a moment to be lost. To my eternal sorrow, I never saw her again.’
This was as much as Master Thankless would say. He seemed reluctant to talk of what had happened in my absence, as if he too found it hard to believe that I truly had been gone for so long. I made matters no better, for I would tell him nothing of my adventure, feeling that it was wise to hold my peace. So it was that we bobbed and curtsied around one another, until at last I was able to make sense of the missing years, and pieced together from bits of information given to me by Gabriel and the tailor a patchwork of the past.
After Danes had left, Master Thankless had become so concerned by all that he had heard that he had taken matters into his own hands and gone to Thames Street to enquire after me, only to be sent away again with a flea in his ear and one of Arise’s sermons ringing in his head. Poor man, he was desperate for news of me, but what could he do? He had no proof that anything was amiss, other than customers’ tittle-tattle, and that didn’t make a bobbin’s worth of thread.
Then Joan fell and died. It was then that all sorts of dreadful rumours began to go around and he became most fretful, for only Hester had ever been seen going to market, and neither hide nor hair had been seen of me. He was on the verge of reporting Maud to the authorities when the good ladies from Arise’s meeting house in Ludgate put it about that I was alive and well and had been brought to the ways of the Lord by Arise Fell himself, for I had had a fair devil in me that needed taming. A little while later Arise with great piety let it be known that, alas, all his hard work had been for naught, for I had run away in search of Danes. According to Master Fell, she was an evil woman, a witch, and I as her apprentice no better.
That would have been the sum total of Master Thankless’s knowledge if it had not been for Gabriel. As Master Thankless said, ‘Young Appleby is many things, but a tailor he will never be. A spy, now, that is a very different matter. There you have a brave one and no mistake. He set to the task of watching the house in Thames Street with more enthusiasm than he has ever shown for stitches.’
This was in August. It was hot, according to the tailor, and the Thames smelt none too sweet when two bodies were dragged from the river near Twickenham, the reeds having held them under for months. There was much talk as to who these two dead people could be, until Maud claimed it was me and Danes. It was a bleak day, said Master Thankless, who in his heart believed none of their nonsense, and gave Gabriel his blessing to find out what he could.
Gabriel, in borrowed cloak and tall hat, had gone to the meeting house in Ludgate, where he had been most surprised to find so much handsome furniture that seemed oddly out of place. He felt certain that this must be my father’s property, though why it should be here and not sold for good coin he did not know.
There was little more to report until the day Arise and Maud had a visitor. He came, so Gabriel found out, by coach from Bristol. He was the one and only visitor they had had to the house, and such was the occasion that they sent Hester out to market alone. That was when Gabriel first got to speak to her, though she fair shook with fright and twisted and turned as if the very walls had eyes and ears to see and hear her by. She told him that the visitor was a lawyer called Tarbett Purman. She spoke of her deepest fears, of strange noises she had heard in the house, creakings and groanings. She was certain that the bodies found in the river were not mine or Danes’s, sure that my grave lay closer to home, in my father’s study.
Gabriel, feeling certain that Hester was in danger, climbed over the garden wall, hoping to see her a second time. They met and talked. After that, Hester disappeared. Gabriel became desperate, saying that he was sure that both of us were in the chest. The tailor once again had no evidence to act upon, until a letter from Master Bedwell arrived at the shop, dated long after the bodies had been pulled from the river. That was how he knew for certain that Danes had not been drowned, for the Bedwells had seen her and wondered if all was well, they being abroad in France and unable to do more than make enquiries.
On hearing all this, how I wished that I was a boy like Gabriel, for then I would have a chance of finding the shadow on my own and saving Tycho. Instead I felt useless, and all I could say was ‘What would we have done without you, Master Thankless?’
‘In truth, it is Gabriel you should thank more than me,’ said Master Thankless. ‘Now, will you allow me to ask you a question? ’
‘Of course.’
‘How is it that you survived three years in a chest with neither food nor water?’
‘Danes once told me the world is a mystery wrapped in a prayer,’ I said. ‘Please do not ask me where I have been, for I cannot say.’
‘That tells me nothing. I see you are going to hold your peace on this. I will say one thing, though. I knew that day when you were little and went missing near my shop that there was something special about you. Those silver shoes of yours and the remedies your mother made. Such magic as that does not belong to this world of the Cross and crucifixion.’
It was not long before Maud Leggs came waddling into the shop. She had become so large that she had to enter sideways. With the voice of a fishwoman rather than that of the wife of a respectable merchant, she began to shout abuse at Master Thankless.
‘Mistress, please,’ said Master Thankless, ‘remember who you are.’
For a moment that settled her, at least long enough for Gabriel and me to clear the shop of its startled customers and close the door.
‘I want to see my daughter,’ said Maud. Her voice was so loud that it could be heard all through the house and halfway along the bridge.
‘Please keep your voice down, mistress. Your daughter is still poorly.’
‘I care naught for that. She be faking it so that she can get out of working. I want her home with me.’
‘No one will be coming home with you today, mistress, nor tomorrow nor the next day,’ said Master Thankless.
‘I demand to see my daughter,’ said Maud again.
‘If you please, mistress, this is my shop and I do not want you in it. Now leave.’
‘Hester, you miserable girl, you come down this minute or I will give you such a beating,’ bellowed Maud, taking
no notice of Master Thankless.
‘If you do not go,’ said Master Thankless, ‘I will call the constable. I am sure he will be pleased to have a word with you.’
‘Go on then,’ said Maud. ‘Call him. I am not afraid of a miserable little stitch-and-pin like you.’
‘I should hope not,’ said Master Thankless. ‘And neither should you be afraid to tell the constable where all Master Hobie’s furniture and fine wines have gone.’
Maud went very quiet.
‘Gabriel,’ said Master Thankless, ‘will you be so kind as to fetch the constable?’
‘Wait,’ said Maud. ‘Less haste. There be no need for that. As you know, the Lord is most particular about his furniture, being offended by turned legs and any form of decoration. Arise Fell says it be as close to Sodom and Gomorrah as you are likely to come, and he should know.’
‘I suppose he should,’ said Master Thankless. ‘And he found the wines no less displeasing?’
‘Oh no,’ said Maud, ‘we drank those. I mean -’
‘And the Good Lord has no objection to your beating and half-starving your daughter and locking your stepdaughter in a chest?’
‘You devil!’ snapped Maud. ‘You twist my words, that you do.’
‘No, mistress,’ said Master Thankless, ‘it is you who are twisted, not my words. Now I would like you to leave.’
She huffed, she puffed, she stamped her fat feet on the floor. ‘I will be back, damn you, so I will. You have no rights over me and my own,’ she shouted as she slammed the shop door shut. The bell went on jangling long after she had gone.
Master Thankless and I went upstairs to find Hester sitting up in bed, looking pale and shaken.
‘I would rather die than go back there,’ she said.
‘I will not hear of it. This house is yours,’ said Master Thankless. ‘Over my dead body will you ever be treated like that again.’
‘I will kill both of them if they so much as touch you,’ declared Gabriel, and he said it with so much passion that we all burst out laughing. Even Hester managed a smile, while Gabriel looked rather red in the face.
Later that day, as I sat beside her, Hester said, ‘I have been thinking that written words are mighty powerful, more so than talking and telling.’
‘Yes, I believe you are right,’ I said.
‘Arise can win any quarrel with words he takes from the Good Book. For they are smart, those words. They can be used to mean one thing one way, but then a person can use the same words to mean something quite different.’
‘Words can be twisted to mean anything,’ I said.
‘That must be harder to do if they are written.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘It is harder if they are written.’
‘Would you mind writing down my words so they can be my shield against all the lies that have been told and all the wrong that has been done? Would you do that for me?’
‘And more,’ I said.
Hester nodded and lay back on the pillows.
These are Hester’s words; this is Hester’s story.
20
Hester
I was raised by my mother’s hand and my father’s pity. He was a tall man without a grain of ill humour, unlike my mother who was filled to the brim with anger.
We had a smallholding on the edge of the Forest of Savernake, with chickens and four sheep and a cow for milk. My mother gave birth more times than the cow, though the calves outlived near all my brothers and sisters, who went back into the earth like unfolded flowers. Only one brother, Ned, survived, he being six summers older than I. Ned used to stand up to my mother so that she was much thwarted in her rages.
This was how we lived, muddling along, ruled by my mother’s temper. I think my father was glad when the war came and he could escape.
I did not want him to go. I begged him not to leave. My father hugged me and said it was his duty to go and fight so that all men could be free. In the eyes of the Lord all men were equal, he said, and so it should be on earth.
My mother did not stop him, saying she was well rid of his slow ways. My father went off to join Cromwell’s army, and you could not blame him for it. He said a thousand Royalists would be hard pushed to match my mother when the temper was upon her.
We were left, Ned and me, to keep our smallholding going. My mother being too large to touch her toes took instead to sitting by the fire raging. If the pot was empty she threatened to kill my father when he returned for leaving her with so little provision. Ned and I worked as hard as we could so that he might live. It was no use. I need not have worried about what my mother would do to him, for my father went missing at the Battle of Naseby and was thought to be dead.
My mother, so accustomed to loss, took no heed of this other than to say that she now be free, and she had an itch to see the city, where there was good coin to be made. My heart, like Ned’s, not being as strong as my mother’s, fair broke with grief.
Our neighbours, the Worts, had a son who like my father had been reported dead. In spite of that, he had come home fit and well, though a bit bruised around the head, some months later. Ned would not hear of our leaving, no matter how much my mother battered him with her ill temper. He stood fast, and we worked the land together, and looked after the animals as best we could. It was a cold wind that blew, those lean years after my father had gone.
Then into our lives crept the crooked man. He called himself a preacher and a prophet, and gave sermons that made people fair quake with fright. My mother took to bringing him home and feeding him with what little we had. Ned told her he had not worked this hard to give it all away.
At last we heard that my father was alive. He was most poorly, having lost a leg in the fighting. Ned and I felt our prayers had been answered, and Ned was all for setting off straight away to bring him home. I imagined then our troubles to be at an end, and that my father would see off the crooked man. It was not to be. My mother would not hear of Ned leaving.
‘A man with one leg is good for naught,’ she said. ‘Anyway, he is sure to be dead by the time you find him, and then even more good coin will have been wasted.’
I tell you truly, it caused a terrible argument between them, and so angry and furious were my mother’s words to Ned that I thought our cottage would come tumbling down. I hid with the animals, and when it was over Ned had gone. He had said he would come back with my father, but he did not and I knew not what to do.
My mother must have washed their names from her heart, for she never talked of them again. The words on her tongue were only for Arise. He told her that King Jesus would shortly reign over England and that we must all make ready for his return, and cleanse the land of its witches and cunning folk who do nothing but work for the Devil.
Arise had a way with words and my mother was mighty taken with him. She told me she would follow him wherever he did wander, and as he made his living by travelling she was all for going with him. I begged her not to leave, and she told me I could stay and starve if that was what I wanted.
We sold the sheep, the cow and the chickens, not getting good coinage for them as they were old and good for naught but meat, and they being skinny, when all was said and done, there was little of that either.
We set off towards Bristol and stayed in the countryside, my mother changing back to her maiden name of Leggs, Jarret being my father’s name.
Arise Fell had as much wrath about him as she did, which greatly pleased her. She reckoned that if wrath be the Lord’s fighting tool then she would willingly take up the sword and do battle.
It was Arise who told her that she had lost all her babies on account of evil charms brought about by a witch.
‘But there be no witches where we live,’ said my mother.
Arise stood up and banged the table so hard with his fist that I near jumped out of my skin.
‘That is the way of cunning women and witches. They hide in villages. I will find them, wherever they are. I will leave no stone unturned,’ he
roared.
My mother did not move, but a smile spread across her face.
‘Now do I remember the Worts and how their son came back home from the wars when all the other menfolk had been killed. My nose always told me there was something fishy about that woman.’
‘What more proof do you need? There is your witch,’ said Arise.
My mother looked like the cat that had got the cream. ‘That were how my babies died and no mistake, all because of that woman’s witchcraft.’
I thought my brothers’ and sisters’ deaths were more to do with her rages and the way she struck them when they cried, but I held my tongue.
Anyway, that was when the trouble began. Arise told my mother that had all she had to do was use that powerful nose of hers to smell out a witch.
My mother sniffed a lot: always had done, it being a habit that she could not help. And wiped her nose on her sleeve. Arise told her she was not to do that any more, and gave her a cloth. She should hold it to her nose and it did not matter her blowing into it as long as it be white.
‘Witches are dirty,’ said Arise. ‘Godly folk are clean.’
He bought both of us new black skirts and jackets and black cloaks, so that we went about the countryside looking like crows.
From then on we followed Arise wherever the Good Lord saw fit to lead him. Folk took him and my mother for husband and wife. I was thought to be Arise’s daughter and my mother did not say otherwise.
They caused terror and trembling wherever they went. In each village and hamlet Arise would put the fear of God into the congregation. So dreadful were his sermons that many women fainted, which my mother, with a sniff of her nose, took to be the first sign of the Devil at work. For there is one thing the Devil cannot abide, so said Arise, and that is the name of the Good Lord said out loud.
Word spread about the preacher and all feared him, and that he would take their money for Maud not to accuse their wives and daughters of being witches. There was good coinage to be made for Arise in finding witches, for many a father and husband, brother or uncle would pay dear for my mother not to sniff too hard.