Perhaps I’d gone rigid, still lacking confidence in the close company of a woman, especially when she was…
… undoing my jerkin.
‘Jesu—’
‘They’ll dry more quickly if you take them off.’
‘Mistress, is this…?’
‘Seemly?’ Peeling my shirt from my skin. ‘Who can ever say? Does it matter?’
Drying my chest now with a cloth of sacking, both her hands moving under it. She’d closed the door so the boy was shut out, and also much of the light. The smoke from the fire was sweet-smelling. Apple wood, clouding the air with fragrance, filling the head.
‘The hose?’
‘I—’
‘I’ll need your hose.’
Her long hands gently fumbling at my waist.
‘Now I’m all wet, too,’ she said.
‘These things happen,’ Anna Ceddol said.
Her voice small now. I could barely draw breath. In the dimness, I saw her overdress falling away. Gave in to the smoke and the soft weight of a breast falling forward into my palm.
I slept. It was a mistake. When I awoke, on the pallet amongst the rushes, there was a smell of stew and herbs from the pot over the fire, and the door was open to the dusk.
Sitting up, I marked my apparel hanging from a beam and Anna Ceddol full-dressed watching the boy playing with his favourite thigh bone on the edge of the hearth, rolling it along the stones, humming to himself like a drone of bees.
She smiled.
‘Is it your wish to pass the night here, Dr John?’
‘I… can’t. I’m expected back at the Bull in Presteigne. And I must needs find the sheriff.’
Thinking I could reach him through Roger Vaughan. That Vaughan would surely vouch for my sanity.
I stretched out my legs, feeling warm and fulfilled in the simplest, most physical sense. She was only the second woman in this world I’d lain with, and my life was turned over again. I couldn’t look at her without wanting her again, wanting her forever.
How easy it is to fall into love.
‘Yet I don’t want to leave you,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid of what the rector will do. The rector’s mad.’
‘I’ve faced worse.’
‘I’m not sure you have.’
She looked at Sion Ceddol, rolling his bone from one side of the hearth to the other, the eerie drone never ceasing.
‘People like to say he’s of the faerie. When he wants to find something, the faerie tell him where it lies – or the dead. Some say it’s the same thing. That the faerie are the spirits of the dead.’
‘I doubt that.’ The mingling of spheres – this I felt, but what did I know? ‘I think the faerie are the essences of things. The spirits of life in the land – in the trees and the rivers and the rocks.’
‘The rocks live?’
‘Some rocks, you can see the life in them. Crystals. It’s my aim to study this for myself. Make experiments.’
I thought of the scryer, Brother Elias, in Goodwife Faldo’s hall, how my attempts to observe and understand had led me only further into darkness and confusion. The perceived shade grown from the shewstone that night… the mention of bones drawing me at once to my guilt over Benlow, the Glastonbury boneman, when it might have been some strange foretelling of my encounter with Sion Ceddol. The trickery our minds perform.
And then I thought of something else that Matthew Daunce had said.
‘Anna…’
She was carefully detaching my jerkin and hose from the nail in the beams, shaking them out as if they were apparel of quality rather than the rubbish I wore.
‘You needn’t worry you might’ve given me a child,’ she said. ‘I’m barren.’
‘I wasn’t—’
‘And glad of it. I’ve been raped twice. Would have been three times, but the third time I agreed, and then he couldn’t do it.’ She took down the items of apparel and laid them by me on the pallet. ‘A young woman alone with an idiot boy, it’s the least a man expects.’
‘You can’t go on,’ I said. ‘You can’t go on with this life.’
I looked at Sion Ceddol who seemed to have fallen to sleep with his arms around the bone. With closed eyes he looked like any other boy and harmless.
‘Come back with me,’ I said.
‘To London. With him?’ She laughed. ‘They’d have him in Bedlam before the week was out. Don’t you see? We can only ever live in places like this.’
‘He has a skill. An important skill.’
I had a momentary crazed vision of presenting Sion Ceddol to Cecil as the only dowser I’d known who might be able to replicate the wonders of Georgius Agricola.
‘Don’t even think of it,’ Anna Ceddol said. ‘The city would terrify him. Me as well. We’re country people. If he wanders out in the night here, as oft-times he does, I know he’ll come to no harm. What were you about to ask me?’
I ached in my breast for her and the gloomed years ahead. Changing his rag every day, washing the shit from him in the stream. Worst of all, never letting him be alone with those his age, particularly the maidens. None of this would be so bad if she wasn’t educated. If she hadn’t the wit to imagine what her life might have been.
I let go a sigh.
‘When Daunce… when he was in full, abusive spate, he spoke of you as… the… the Great Papist’s…’
‘Whore?’
Her eyes were like rock.
I nodded, turning away from her, beginning quickly to drag on my apparel.
‘It’s not true,’ she said. ‘But it might have been.’
I stopped dressing.
‘I think I told you of a rich man who offered me a home in Presteigne. I’d spent one night with him. Or half a night. He gave me money. He’d been… a monk. At the head of a monastery.’
‘
I stumbled, half into my hose. Could hardly say the name.
‘He had a reputation,’ she said. ‘Even when in Holy Orders. Could not keep it in his robe.’
I sat down on the stool by the fire to put on my boots, shaking my head. How could this woman consider herself so worthless that she’d give herself to a man such as this even for one night?
Sion Ceddol, awake again, came and sat on the rushes a few feet from me. He was looking to the side of me where the tall stones rose like the remains of an ingle.
As if watching something.
He smiled.
‘He likes you,’ Anna said.
‘How can you tell?’
Thinking he hadn’t liked me up at the holy well, when he thought I’d stolen his thigh bone.
‘He’s within a few feet of you,’ she said, ‘and he isn’t screaming the walls down.’
‘Where…’ I didn’t really want to ask her. ‘Where was he when you… were with Smart?’
‘There was a housekeeper. A young woman. She survived the night by plying Sion with sweetmeats. My feeling was that she was one of several woman who… worked for him.’
‘And this was all in Presteigne?’
