I cannot believe Anne is as good as she appears. More importantly, I must not believe. I don’t know why I am getting caught up in all their sticky business. I ought to stand aside and let him get on with beating the breath out of her.
It’s a game. All of this is a game, and I’ve never lost one yet. Not one of them will get the mastery of me. Especially not her. I have her wrapped around my finger. She thinks she’s found me out and for now I am content to let her ramble down that path, me dancing ahead, for I do love to lead folk a dance. I’m glad to be able to lay off acting the idiot, with her at least. It is an exhausting part. Of course, I must keep it up with him, at least until I choose otherwise. And I will be the one to choose.
She thinks she’s seen the whole of me. Not so. She’s peeled one blanket off the bed. Now she is looking at the one beneath, for I am heaped with them: I am sheet after sheet and each a different colour and weave. I have a hundred faces to show and not one of them is my own. It occurs to me that it is so long since I wore my true face that I do not recall who that person is. The thought slides a claw down my spine, so I thrust it away and stop thinking about it. No one sees my face and that is how it shall stay. Not even Death’s seen that.
I am still on my guard, more than ever. I sleep with one eye open, waiting for the mob at the door. I am affrighted by dreams. Always the same one: Anne, crowing, You fool. You trusted me? Ha! I shall close my eyes and count to ten. We want for sport. Run. Be the Vixen you are.
I fall to my knees and beg, just as I begged my mother in my other life. Begged for kindness, for mercy, for my small body to be given back to me. She throws back her head and laughs, Anne or my mother, I cannot tell. If it’s not Anne in my nightmares then it’s Knot-Beard, hanging over me. Where’s my virgin? he leers. I grow hungry. I start awake, heart thundering so wildly I am sure it will break free through my breast.
Knot-Beard will forget my bargain. I’ll take someone else. If I can’t find someone else then I’ll take her, be done with it and feel nothing. I’ll work out something. I always do. Anne doesn’t matter. Of course she doesn’t. No one has ever mattered. But there’s a thrumming within my belly as though some hand has plucked a string deep inside my gut.
As for the priest, he never lets me be. He spies on me through the stable wall, worming his fingers into the daub and picking holes in the plaster, the better to gawp at his miracle, for that is what he has decided I am. If he gets some shrivelled-up pleasure watching me, then I am content, for I’ve had far worse.
It amuses me to throw crumbs in his path and watch him dive at them like a famished crow. I give him a fair old show. One day I coo as sweetly as a dove when he reads me a passage from the Gospel, the next I strip off my shift and caper naked. One moment I kneel and force my features to match those of the angels painted on the wall, the next I howl like a pup, and how I keep from laughing out loud at my own antics, I do not know.
By God, it makes me merry to see the dolt bounce in my wake as I frolic through the village. He doesn’t even have the excuse of being an old dolt. He’s young. Considering the efforts I go to, he ought to throw pennies to thank me for the entertainment, the tight-fisted lizard. Poorer folk have done as much and more.
He is not entirely stupid, for all his stiff neck and pretence at a limp pintle. Perhaps I should not test him so. I might slip and make a mistake: the birds proved I am capable of error. I shake the thought from my head. No. By Saint Peter’s fishy farts, that was no mistake. I was duped. Anyone would have done the same. I’ll not birch myself for something that was not my fault.
If he didn’t force the wizened stick of his faith down my throat, maybe I’d be kinder, though I doubt it. I have so many baptisms I have the cleanest head this side of Bristol. He drones the same words every day at the same hour and everything he says sticks in my throat sharp as a fishbone. Perhaps angels are comforted by this day-in, day-out repetition. If I were the Ear of God I should be mortally bored.
The closest I get to his money is the shrine, for saints love nothing better than to rest their bones on golden beds, but it’s locked fast. He lets me poke about in the cupboards, for he takes my curiosity as one of his interminable signs of godliness. My nose twitches, but all I find are books and more books. He’s so proud of his psalteries and gospels and legendaries it makes me want to choke. I watch him lift them off the shelf gently as a first-born son, kiss their furrowed covers and gabble on about the word of the Lord. I can fill neither my belly nor my pockets on a diet of words.
‘You called her good,’ he says. ‘The female,’ he adds, dragging the word out to breaking point, for in his eyes I am still too stupid to understand. ‘That was generous,’ he says, and sourly too, for he makes no secret of his jealousy that my first word was for her. ‘But there are things far more worthy of praise. We must praise God above all, must we not?’
I blow a raspberry. He marches me to the church wall, grabs my ears and twists my head in the direction of a painting of Christ.
‘You know who that is, don’t you? He is our Saviour.’
You could have fooled me. This creature has a nose like a turnip and a halo the shape of a failed pancake, drawn with all the skill of a sow clasping a brush in her trotters. If that is our Saviour, then God help us all.
‘Yes?’ he warbles hopefully.
No, you fool, I think. It’s not Christ. It’s a painting, and a shameful one at that. I waggle my tongue at it.
‘Come now. You said good about that woman. Won’t you give me the same? Do it.’ He jabs a stubby finger at the wall. ‘That is Christ your Redeemer. He is good. Good, damn you. Good!’
His arm falls, his chin falls. He claps his hand over his eyes.
‘Dear Lord,’ he croaks. ‘Forgive me.’
He drops to his knees, wringing his paws together. With a lurch, he heaves to one side and cracks his head against the plaster. I see stars even if he does not. It’ll do me no good if he splits his pate open. I’m the only one around and will end up charged with murder as likely as not. That’d be a pretty pass: accused of something I had no hand in for once.
I pat his sleeve and whine piteously, careful not to say a word. I don’t think for one moment he’s crafty enough to snare me thus into speaking, but trickery comes in all shapes and sizes.
‘Mew,’ I say. ‘Mew.’
He groans and clasps his head. ‘God have mercy! Forgive my pride!’
So that’s it: he is penitent only, not mad. He gives his brow a second whack for good measure and resumes his usual prattle about pestilence and miracles and what have you. His skull must be as solid as a keystone to withstand the battering he’s just dealt it. Which explains a great deal, I think, and chuckle. He is out of his remorseful daze in an instant, hands gripping my shoulders. I twist my chuckle into a gurgle.
‘Yes?’ he asks, bruised noggin forgotten. ‘A word for Father Thomas?’
I feel sorry for the poor sap. Not that sorry, however. I think of how quick he’d turf me out if I wasn’t his celestial toy. I gag, and gulp, and swim my hands about and by-and-by he sighs and lets me go.
I have had enough. Enough of being tossed to and fro on the churning seas of this man’s need, self-pity, envy, greed, pride and who can guess what else: more deadly sins than you can shake a stick at. Now that it’s clear he has nothing worth stealing, or at least nothing I can get my paws on, I’ll waste no more time in this church.
I turn about, flip up the hem of my shift and bare my arse at the wall. Wrinkling my brow, I make a drawn-out groan and squeeze out a turd. He watches, unable to stir. When I’m done, I rub my buttocks against the plaster and race out of the door into the sunlight, turning cartwheels as I go.
Kindness is always a trick. I must not trust Anne. If I do, what then?
I know mouths opened only to curse, hands raised only to strike me down. I am so used to cruelty that I do not know what it is to taste sweetness; so used to running that I do not know what it means to stand still. It is not a skill I have ever had to learn. I can lie, cheat, cozen, simper and act a hundred parts, and not one of them is real. My heart has grown as crooked as this disguise I wear.
Now I am faced with a truth of feeling and it terrifies me more than Death. In Death there is familiarity. With Anne, there is the chance that I might live. A different life.