“Lord, that’s awful.” I cringe.
“They’re the unmarriageable daughters, the ones no one else wants.”
“I guess I’m kind of in the Pitiful category myself.”
“Oh, come on,” she chides. “Give yourself a chance.”
I shrug it off. “What about you?”
“Let’s do our recitation,” she dodges with a wink.
We turn to today’s lesson and I read the Latin, still halting, but better.
“Decimus humilitatis gradus est, si non sit facilis ac promptus in risu.”
Alice looks up and smiles. “The tenth step to humility is to avoid laughter,” she translates in a whisper. She nudges me mischievously. “I’ll never last.”
Suddenly a great cry goes up in the cloister, and we all go running down the corridor. The sub-prioress herself is on the ground, holding a young nun in her arms.
“He crouches there in the shadows,” the girl pants, gesturing above her head. “The dragon…fire glowing in his iron belly…spitting hot coals at me!”
The colors of her voice shake like shimmering flame. I could almost believe her—some nuns keep vigils and stay awake for days until they begin to see things. Creatures. Beings from another realm.
That kind of orange-sparked fury has appeared to me once before, on the day I fought with Da—the day everything began to unravel.
* * *
—
The sun was well past noon. All morning I had vacillated between tears and growls—Da had said there was no future with Mason. Now that Da had been named reeve, he said it was our chance to raise our prospects.
“I won’t allow this family to go backward,” he’d said. “He’s a wanderer, Edyth. All stonemasons are. If we were still just a family of sheep shearers, he would be a fine choice. But I’m telling you that we must wait and find someone more appropriate. I won’t have you leaving Hartley Cross. Your mam needs you here when the baby comes. Put him out of your mind. Forget about the Mason boy.”
That afternoon, I sat on the threshold, furiously carding wool, my body hot with anger. Then I heard a little sound, like the distant scurrying of a mouse at first, padding and scratching down the garden path. The noise rapidly changed and grew voices: a celebration? A wedding?
Well, now I know that’ll never be me, I thought.
Shouts and hollers exploded from the roar of a crowd, an orange-sparked cloud of men’s voices rolling up the hill. The ground beneath my feet popped with the energy, not of reveling, but of rage, and it lit into me and I bolted out of the wattle gate. As I ran, I saw more sparks, pocks of flame rising from a mob rushing down the high street.
Thief!
Liar!
Traitor!
In their midst, the gray eye in the firestorm, was the hooded and roped victim of their fury.
My mind went crazy with the cacophony of crowd color. I hated public hangings; I’d seen a dozen criminals hung from this bridge over the years. But I ran toward the growing throng anyway. I jumped along the fringe of the crowd, trying to get a glimpse as they willed themselves, one throbbing entity, onto the wooden bridge. The men were all from Hartley Cross. The miller wrapped a noose of heavy rope and handed it to Lord Geoffrey, who shoved it down over the hooded head and tied the other end to the rail. There was no chance the victim could break free of his bonds; down was the only way out of this.
I ran around the bridge to the riverbank and stood shin-deep in the water, my skirts waving in the current like fish tails. Just as the men hoisted the condemned man up onto the bridge rail, I saw something flash in the sun: a familiar bronze belt buckle under a round belly.
The mob pushed the man from the railing, and he dropped into the frothing river, flailing there, wet only to the knees, until the violent splashing gave way to a gentler wake, and finally stillness, as the water ebbed against the unresisting body. Lord Geoffrey reached over the railing and pulled off the sackcloth hood. Red hair and beard tumbled over the scarlet, bulging face.
Da.
Currents of green life lapped at my ankles and surged up my body: the last of my father’s life, washing out into the river soil.
“See there, men?” spat Lord Geoffrey. “There’s justice yet! Reeve Edgar le Sherman, honest and fair,” he mocked, “defrauding his own fellows for gain. Funneling my money to a Flemish woolers’ uprising! Remember this: anyone who steals from a lord steals bread from your own table. Today you did your duty and caught the thief!”
A righteous cry went up from the mob.
The sting of the cold water waved up into my feet and I froze to the spot in the muck.
“From this point on, shun his family!” With that, Lord Geoffrey shot a look directly at me. I hadn’t been aware of how conspicuous I was. “Let no one come to their aid—let them beg or starve!”
“But my mam…the baby—” I didn’t know where the words were coming from, since I was outside my body.
What was happening?
Just then, a woman’s wail threaded through the venomous cheers. Mam. My mother was coming, her legs buckling as she leaned the full weight of herself and her unborn baby on Henry’s arm. The crowd dispersed at the appearance of the pregnant widow they’d just made, shame turning their heads this way and that.
Two figures stood alone on the bridge: Mam and Henry, looking over the rail at the eddying body below them. Henry rushed into the water and grabbed our father around the waist, trying to sort out a way to get him down. He spotted me on the other side of the river.
“Edyth!” he called. “Help me!”
Like a statue coming to life, I took a step toward Henry, but the riverbed dropped, too deep to wade across.
“Go up and cut the rope!” Henry shouted. I took my knife from my belt, ran up to the bridge and hacked at the rope. My face burned and I could barely breathe. The damn thing was too thick. I sawed and sawed, cursing the rope, tears and snot and spit everywhere, the sparks so furious I couldn’t see past them. Mam sat on the ground, her huge stomach resting on her outspread legs, hands helplessly at her sides, howling and howling.
At last the rope’s inner core snapped, and the current jerked Henry and Da forward.
“Edyth! Get down here!” Henry hollered.
I ran back around and plunged into the water. Together we lugged our father’s body to the bank. We sat stunned and soaked and panting.
“Wait here,” said my brother. “I’ll go home and get the cart.”