The Cursed Wife

Cecily

Prologue

London, Little Wood Street, November 1590

Outside, a blustery wind is shoving clouds across the sun. The light comes and goes, comes and goes, sweeping stripes of sunlight and shadow across the city like bars across a prison window.

Inside, the chamber is empty except for the two of us. Once as close as sisters. One fair, one dark. One a mistress, one a maid.

One alive, one dead.

Before, the air was rent with fury, with the sourness of resentment, of jealousy, of fear. Now there is nothing, just the jerking of my heart and the shriek of her absence and a muffled rushing and roaring in my ears.

She lies unmoving on the rush matting, one arm bent awkwardly beneath her, her cap askew. Her eyes are open, fixed on the chest where the sunlight skims the belly of a silver jug and moves on, but they do not blink. Her lips are parted as if she is about to speak, a tiny thread of green silk trailing from the corner of her mouth, but she is not going to brush it irritably away.

She is dead. The light has gone from her, snuffed out, as easily as pinching a wick between your fingers. I knew it straight away, a bright shard of terror slicing through me then falling away to leave me numb.

I must move, I must think, but I can’t. I can just stand here, turning the embroidered cushion between my hands, around and around and around. My fingertips graze the piping, slide across the damask, skip over the piping once more, on and on until I am sure that I can feel every thread in the weft, every curve of the pattern. My gaze flickers frantically around the chamber, looking at anything but the crumpled lack of her on the floor.

There is a clog in my throat, hard and unyielding. I can’t swallow it down, can’t choke it up. A vicious pressure is building behind my eyes, and in my chest fear is rising, swelling unstoppably.

Dear God, what have I done?

The wind bangs accusingly on the glass panes, rattling at the casement, as if it knows exactly what happened. If it gets in, it will swirl up the truth that has been hidden for so long and shout it along the streets, and all will be lost. I cannot let that happen, but what can I do?

What can I do?

I pushed her, yes, but she pushed me too. I was just trying to make her understand, but she would not listen. I did not mean this to happen. I had no idea. If I could go back to quarrelling, I would. I wish that I could. I wish that I could unravel time, pull the thread back and back and back through the years to when we were little maids and we loved each other and we still had the chance to do things differently.

PART I

Chapter One

Mary

London, Little Wood Street, March 1590

Sometimes I forget that I am cursed.

It seems at first as if this will be an ordinary day. The rain is thundering onto the roof tiles when I stir, and I am tempted to pretend that I haven’t woken and to burrow closer into my husband’s warm back for a few more minutes. But above the sound of the rain I can hear the household stirring: rustling, a cough, the clang of a pot. Footsteps down the narrow stairs from the eaves. The telltale creak of the door into the yard.

From somewhere below comes a bump and a crash and a muttered oath. That will be Sarah, the new maid, coney-brained and clumsy, with a longing for her village and the life she knew.

My husband mumbles as I ease reluctantly away from him and grope through the curtains for the clean shifts I left close by on a stool. Sucking in my breath at the coolness of the linen, I pull them under the covers to warm them.

‘It’s dark still,’ my husband grumbles. To the world Gabriel is a shrewd merchant, stern and severe, but here in our bedstead he is just a man who does not like mornings. He turns over and throws a heavy arm over me, pressing his face into my shoulder and pinning the shifts between us. His warm breath huffs against my skin and I lift a hand to stroke his beard. Small touches, that is all that I allow myself. It is my penance.

‘It’s raining. If it were not, the sun would be well up, and you would be springing out of bed, eager to get on with your business.’

With a grunt he hauls himself up onto the pillows and scrubs his hands over his face. ‘There will be little enough business today if it keeps raining like this,’ he says. ‘I might as well stay snug at home with my wife.’ He tickles my waist suggestively and I laugh as I push his hand away and wriggle into my shift, telling myself I have not noticed the quick shiver down my spine, that I do not remember another time when I pushed someone away.

Every time you change your smock.

‘Your wife has better things to do than lie abed all day. The household will not run itself.’

I am still smiling as I kneel to pray by the bedstead. I clasp my hands together, resting my forehead on my steepled knuckles, and I thank God from the bottom of my heart for blessing me with a home and a family, for making me safe.

For turning the curse aside.

Afterwards, I call Amy to help me dress, but she is heavy-eyed with toothache and her jaw is so swollen that I send her down to the kitchen to make a warm clout to press against it.

‘What about your laces, mistress?’

‘Cecily can help me. Go on now, Amy, and send Cecily to me. I will look at your tooth later.’

In truth, I can dress myself for the most part, but it is good for my daughter to learn how to serve. She chatters happily as she lays out a petticoat and disentangles the laces on my bodice. She is in a gay mood this morning, and why should she not be? At thirteen, Cecily is still the pampered baby of the household and indulged more than is good for her, I fear. I try to harden my heart, but it only takes one dimpled smile or tears shimmering in the beautiful eyes, and my resolve melts. Gabriel is no better. He lets her coax him into a ribbon for her hair or some other pretty geegaw that has caught her eye as if he really were her father.

‘She brings sunshine into the household on the dreariest of days,’ he says, and it is true. Cecily has the ability to brighten the room with her smile. She is so passionate in her desires, in her laughter, as well as in her tears. There is no middle way for Cecily. Her tantrums can be terrible, I know, but her sweetness is a joy for us all.

She helps lace me into my kirtle and pins my lace into place. I straighten Peg, the one-armed wooden baby that sits on the chest, as Cecily shakes the covers on the bed and pulls the curtains back.

‘Why do you do that?’ she asks, and I turn in surprise.

‘Do what?’

‘Touch the wooden baby.’

‘Do I?’ I ask startled.

‘Every morning,’ she says. ‘Before you go downstairs. I have often noticed it.’

I laugh, half embarrassed. ‘Really? I don’t know why.’

But I do know, I think. Peg is my only link to the truth of me, to the family that was my own. After all these years, the memory of my parents and my sisters has rubbed away and left little more than flickers of light in a blurry shade: a gentle hand resting on my head; my sisters’ squeals of laughter; the boisterous boom of my father’s voice when he came back from St Bartholomew’s Fair. I remember being swung into the air, breathless with the terror and delight of it, the feel of his big hands at my waist. ‘See what I have bought you, lambkin!’

I bought Cecily a wooden baby at the fair when we first came to London, and I sewed it a tiny gown, just as my mother sewed a gown for Peg. But Cecily never cared for her baby the way I cared for Peg. She dropped it in the street one day and we never saw it again.

Every few years I repaint Peg’s face and give her a new smile, serene and friendly. I make her a new miniature cap and gown at the same time, but I have never replaced the missing arm. Sometimes I long to forget what happened to it, but I know that I need to remember.

Now I give Peg’s skirts a tweak and pat her wooden head, and I could almost swear that she smiles back at me. ‘It’s just a habit,’ I tell Cecily who crosses her eyes at me.

‘I hope nobody else ever sees you do that, Mamma. They would think you quite mad!’

‘You are saucy, miss.’ I try to frown in reproof, but I end up smiling, as Cecily knew that I would. I can never resist her laughter.

She is so like Cat in that way.

I am glad she does not look like Cat. Her curls are dark and lustrous, while Cat’s were the gold of ripening corn, and her eyes are bright and brown as a puppy’s, not cornflower blue. There are times when her hands dart and dance in the air, when she sits at the virginals and her lovely voice fills the chamber, when the dazzle of her smile makes my chest hurt, those times I cannot help but think of Cat, and the thought of her is a finger pressing on the puckered scar on my hand, poignant with remembered pain more than pain itself.

It must have rained like this when Noah was building his ark, I think, as Cecily follows me down our fine new staircase. I cajoled Gabriel into having it built, and a little thrill of possession shivers through me every time I walk up and down it. I like to imagine how it will be when the wood has darkened and the smell of seasoned oak has mellowed and generations have smoothed their hands over the banister just as I do.

But my good mood evaporates as the morning wears on. It is so dark that we have to light candles at nine of the clock, and the constant drumming and splattering and dripping outside are a wearisome backdrop to a day full of small disasters: butter that will not churn, a broken jug, Cecily tearful about a rent in her petticoat. The gloom puts everyone on edge, and I snap at Sarah when she hums as she sweeps the kitchen floor while I’m trying to look in Amy’s mouth.

‘Sarah, please stop that.’

Her mouth drops open and she freezes mid-sweep. ‘Stop sweeping?’

‘Stop singing that—’ I bite down on a curse. ‘—that . . . song.’

Sarah looks vacant. ‘Oh, John, Come Kiss Me Now’ is sung everywhere. The tune floats out of alehouse windows and from street corners. Wherever the waits are playing or an apprentice is whistling, whenever a maid picks up a lute or a rogue his fiddle, that is the song they choose. She probably doesn’t even know what she has been humming.

I cannot tell them that every time I hear the tune, fear and guilt twist and tangle in my belly. That my throat thickens and I struggle for breath. I try to close my ears to it, but this morning the rain and the darkness are pinching at my nerves and I cannot find my usual even temper.

‘Hum something else,’ I tell Sarah shortly and turn back to Amy. ‘Cecily, do you hold the candle still. I cannot see anything if you wave it around like that. Come closer.’

Cecily and Amy exchange wary looks as my daughter steps obediently closer and holds the candle over my shoulder. Sarah resumes sweeping, mutinously silent now, and the rasp of the broom across the tiles scratches in my ears almost as irritatingly as the song. I hiss in a breath and twitch my shoulders to loosen the tension there before I bend over Amy once more.

I prise open her mouth as gently as I can and peer inside. ‘The tooth must be drawn,’ I say as I straighten.

Amy’s eyes roll in her head and she claps a hand to her cheek where it is puffy and red. ‘Oh, mistress, no! No, I beg you! The pain is not so bad. It will go away soon.’

‘Amy, the tooth will not unpoison itself,’ I say, exasperated. ‘You will not feel better until it is gone. I will go with you to the barber if you are afraid.’

She looks wildly around for an excuse. ‘It is too wet to go out.’

‘What is a little rain compared to the pain in your tooth?’

But Amy digs in her heels like a hound being dragged away from a scent. ‘If you please, mistress, a plaster like the one you gave Tom when he had the toothache will be all I need.’

I sigh and shake my head, but I can hardly force her to the barber surgeon if she will not go. Amy is a strong, sonsy lass, broad of face and broad of beam, dogged in her devotion to the household but immovable as an ox when it comes to doing what she does not wish to do. There is no point in telling her that Tom’s gum was not swollen and oozing.

‘I have no time to argue with you, Amy,’ I say instead with a severe look. ‘If you choose to suffer, so be it.’

Dinner is late, just one more vexation in a vexatious day. I am chivvying Sarah and Cecily to set up the table in the hall when there is a knock at the door. I am closest, so I open it myself and my irritable frown is wiped away by a smile of pleasure. ‘Richard!’ I stand back and hold the door wider open. ‘Welcome back!’

Richard Martindale is captain of the Catherine, one of Gabriel’s ships and named for me, or so my husband thinks. The Catherine is a sturdy cog that sails to the Baltic laden with fothers of lead and bales of cloth, and brings back oils and spices, salt and copper, glass and books, anything that catches Gabriel’s factor’s eye. Richard himself is a bluff seaman with deep creases at the edges of his eyes and a weathered air. Behind him bobs his servant, Jacopo, a tiny wiry man, his face seamed and brown as a nut. Even sheltered under the jetty, they are both dripping.

‘Come in out of the rain.’ I beckon them in and call for Sarah to take their wet cloaks. ‘What brings you out in such weather?’

‘The wet is nothing to us, is it, Jacopo?’ Richard claps him on his sodden doublet, splattering raindrops onto the floor. ‘There is more water than this at sea, I can assure you, my lady! And as we are newly docked, I thought your husband would want to know of our voyage.’

‘He will be glad to see you.’ I point Richard towards Gabriel’s closet, which he knows well. ‘You see that we will be eating soon. Will you dine with us?’

He bows. ‘With pleasure. Jacopo, make yourself useful.’

‘Always, captain.’

Jacopo waits until Richard has knocked on Gabriel’s door before shooting me an expectant look. He reminds me of a monkey I saw in the market once, sitting on a sailor’s shoulder, a quick, bright-eyed creature, but a little frightening too.

‘What have you brought me this time?’ I relent with a smile and he flicks his wrist and a seashell appears in his palm as if by magic. He bows as he offers it to me.

Jacopo always brings me a gift from his travels. His leg was broken by a load that fell from a crane onto the quayside some seven years ago now. Gabriel was standing right beside him. The barber surgeon wanted to cut off the leg, but Richard shouted at him and would not have it, and Gabriel sent a boy running for me instead. I cleaned the wounds and gave Jacopo some powdered poppy to help him sleep as we strapped his leg straight. In truth, I did not think he would survive, and the lack of fever was due more to his robust constitution than to my skill, but Jacopo believes that I saved his leg and yearns to repay the debt. His gifts, he says, are paltry things: I am to ask a service of him, anything, and he will do it. And he looks at me with an intensity that makes me uneasy. It is as if I owe him now. I owe him an outrageous demand, a sacrifice.

How old Jacopo is and where he comes from are a mystery. Richard says Jacopo had sailed to the edges of the world and back before he became his servant. He had been to Batavia where the ships filled their holds with spices, and to Africa where they filled them with slaves. He was familiar with ports from Acre to Amsterdam, from the West Indies to the Cape of Good Hope. He fell in with Richard at last in Genoa. ‘Or was it Sicily?’ Richard says sometimes. It seems that Richard rescued Jacopo from two attackers, and in gratitude Jacopo attached himself to Richard as a manservant, much to the sea captain’s bemusement.

‘Queer little fellow,’ Richard confided to me once. ‘I told him he didn’t need to serve me, but he refused to listen. If he thinks himself in debt to you, he’ll do anything – anything! – for you. Why, once I fell into an argument about a bill, and the next day the innkeeper was found with his throat cut. Might have been coincidence, of course, but I’ve learnt never to ill-wish anyone when he’s listening.’

I have never told the children about that, but Tom in particular is fascinated by him, and likes to make up stories to explain his past. Jacopo was a mercenary, he thinks. Or perhaps he was a pirate, or an assassin. I would like to dismiss such ideas, but I know why Tom imagines him that way. There is an intensity to Jacopo, an alert, coiled quality, like a wild animal that might spring at any moment. I have seen him spin round at an unexpected movement, his eyes wild and his lips drawn back in a snarl, a dagger flashing in his hand, only for the dagger to vanish in an instant when he realised there was no danger after all. The menace was wiped from his face and he was smiling, and it all happened so quickly that I have sometimes wondered whether I imagined it.

The children mock his devotion to me. ‘You cannot ask him to take a letter to John in Hamburg,’ Tom said. ‘That is not enough for Jacopo. Much too tame a service. He would rather do something bold for you. Why don’t you ask him to kill for you? That would be much more in Jacopo’s line.’

‘I wish you would ask him to rid you of Mistress Parker,’ Cecily said, too pertly. ‘She is hateful!’

‘Or my French master.’

‘Or that tedious Goodwife Blake, always fretting about her child and sending for you at the most inconvenient times.’

‘Hush,’ I broke in firmly. ‘You speak of a sin.’

These children, they think murder is a laughing matter. They know nothing.

Now I take the shell from Jacopo and try not to notice how strong and quick his hands are. Hands that might twist a garrotte or spin a knife.

I turn the shell carefully. It is a fragile thing, much lighter than I expected, curved like a snail’s shell but twenty times the size, with curious red stripes as it curls into itself. ‘It is beautiful,’ I say.

‘Hold it to your ear, my lady,’ Jacopo says. ‘You will hear the sea.’

I tilt my head and cover my ear with the shell. A gentle rushing, roaring sound fills my head and I close my eyes and imagine the sea that I have never seen. But then through the rushing comes the sly echo of the tune Sarah was humming earlier – Oh, John, come kiss me – and my eyes snap open as my heart jolts in horror. I want to throw the shell away from me, but instead I force a smile.

‘Thank you, Jacopo.’

It is a poor meal that we sit down to when Gabriel and Richard emerge at last with the satisfied air of business well done. It must have been a profitable trip. I view the table with dissatisfaction. Poor little Sarah is still nervous and clumsy in the kitchen and Amy too preoccupied with her toothache to be any help at all. Between mending the petticoat and making sure that Sarah swept up all the shards of the broken jug, I boiled pigeons with cinnamon and ginger. There was some veal pie left over from the day before, but Sarah let the cream for a custard curdle and the tart I made with some wrinkled apples burned at the edges while she was attempting to comfort Amy.

The men do not seem to notice. They eat heartily as they compare memories of dipping their hands into barrels of peppercorns and cloves, of clinging to masts as their ships bucked and reeled through monstrous storms, of bargains struck and risks taken and profits made. I listen, rubbing the scar on my hand absently as they swap stories spun on distant quaysides: cities paved with gold, savages gorgeously attired, monstrous snakes and strange fruits. Tom listens wide-eyed.

Gabriel had three sons when I married him. John, the eldest, is lately returned from his apprenticeship in Hamburg. I sent him away a boy, and he has returned a man, his shoulders broader, his neck thicker. I am biased, I know, but he is a fine-looking fellow, with Gabriel’s steady eyes, an open face and a good-humoured mouth. Cecily adores him. When he first returned she was shy of him, after four years apart, but now everything is ‘John says’ or ‘John thinks’. Gabriel pretends to be sad. ‘It used to be Pappa says,’ he teases her. ‘But you do not care what your pappa thinks now, do you, sweetheart?’

Twelve years ago, John was nine and Tom only three. And between them, quiet Nicholas, so like his father and closest to my heart. When he died of an infected wound at fourteen, I grieved for him as if he had been my own son. Now Tom is older than Nick was then, and wild to start his own apprenticeship in Hamburg. It seems no time at all since he was a small boy, sturdy and tousle-haired, trailing home from school with his shirt billowing out of his muddied hose, his laces trailing and his cap askew. I tell Gabriel that Tom is too young still to go away, but he is fifteen and a child no longer. He is ready to leap.

I will miss him. There will only be Cecily left a child, and at thirteen already, it will not be long until she, too, will leave. I can hardly bear to think of her married. I look at her beauty and her innocence, and I shudder to remember her father. We must choose a husband for her with care.

But not yet.

I pick fretfully at a piece of pie. Oh, I am all raw edges today, scratching against the slightest thing: the scrape of stools over the tiles, the clunk as Sarah sets the pie too heavily on the table. I put the seashell on the chest to keep it safe, and it catches irritatingly at the corner of my eye. Every time it does, I seem to hear that whispery echo of the tune pressing like a cold knife at the back of my neck and the scar on my hand twitches and throbs.

When the men have out-marvelled each other at last, Gabriel notices Amy, who is slumped wanly on a stool at the end of the table, pressing a linen clout to her cheek.

‘What is wrong with Amy?’ he asks, picking out a choice piece of pigeon and offering it to Richard.

‘She has the toothache, Pappa,’ Cecily tells him. ‘Mamma says she must go to the barber surgeon, but Amy will not go.’

‘She is afraid,’ I say, but Gabriel only nods.

‘I had a tooth drawn once,’ he tells Amy. ‘I was afraid too.’

‘I would rather sail into waves twenty yards high than let the barber surgeon at my mouth,’ Richard adds, ignoring my warning frown. ‘Jacopo once had to tie me down and take out a tooth for me himself, did you not, Jacopo?’

‘Aye, and you cursed me for it up and down the seven seas, cap’n.’

‘I’ll pull Amy’s tooth out for her,’ offers Tom, his mouth full of bread. ‘We can tie a thread around her tooth and tie it to an open door, and then slam it closed very quickly and the tooth will be out before she can say barber surgeon,’ he suggests. ‘Why pay for his services?’

‘You will do no such thing,’ I say firmly as Cecily and Sarah squeak, round-eyed with horror, and Amy whimpers.

‘Fear not, Amy.’ John leans forward with a kind smile. ‘I will be your knight errant and keep Tom away from you.’

Amy only manages a wan smile. Ordinarily she would have been blushing with pleasure at John’s attention. Her tooth must be hurting.

‘I will give her something for the pain,’ I say, ‘and if the tooth be not better tomorrow, I will ask the barber to come whether she wills it or no.’

But when Richard and Jacopo have taken their leave and I go to my still room, I find only a few dusty seeds of poppy head in the drawer of the little cabinet where I keep my roots, seeds and herbs. In spite of it being daylight still, I have sent Amy to bed but she will not sleep without a syrup of poppy, and there is not enough here to make it. I sigh, pushing the drawer closed with too much force. I wish I could go back to bed and start this day anew.

Foolishly, I find myself blaming Sarah. If she had not been humming that cursed tune, the drawer would be full of poppy, I decide. Or Amy would have agreed to go to the barber straight away, and the dinner would not have been such a hotchpotch. It might even