As Meat Loves Salt. Maria McCann

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СКАЧАТЬ did Biggin say?’ demanded Izzy. ‘Is he coming over to fetch the body? Do they know what the boy was doing here?’

      ‘During the night? No,’ Zeb returned. ‘He is to be carried back there tomorrow. The most suitable cart is out at present, but they will send it over with a coffin – the carpenter is put to the job already.’

      ‘And the surgeon?’ I asked.

      ‘They had no cause to tell me. I guess they’ll call one to the house when the boy arrives. You washed him, Jacob. Did you see—?’

      ‘Slit right up the belly. They won’t need a surgeon to interpret that.’

      ‘O, the little fool!’

      Izzy stared at him. ‘Fool?’

      My heart began to thump. Supposing Zeb was risen, gone to the chamber window. It was bright moonlight when I grabbed the boy’s knife, and my empty bed – but no, his way of speaking to me earlier on –

      ‘Out,’ Zeb insisted. ‘Let us go out. You fetch the hangings, I will set up the line, when I have once rid myself of these clothes. I am not Sir Bastard, to ruin them with dust.’ He hurried off towards the stairs leading to our chamber. Izzy and myself gazed at the hangings which covered three walls of the hall, and then at one another.

      

      ‘Hold hard – there’s a corner come down – let me not trip!’ Thus, standing on a chair, did I bully my brother from above. It was my task to unhook the tapestries from the wall while Izzy gathered up the edges and held them away from my feet.

      ‘I have it,’ he assured me. ‘Step down.’ A spider ran over my neck as I dangled one leg in the air, almost causing me to fall, but at last we laid the third hanging on the worn flags of the floor. Izzy loaded me up and we progressed along the corridor, my brother going ahead to open each door as I came to it.

      ‘Wait,’ he said as we emerged into the sun. I was glad enough to stand and do nothing as he ducked back into the house, coming out directly with the carpet-beaters. There were five of these, supposedly from Turkey, of fine withy and all different in form. Godfrey said they had been presented to My Lady by some traveller much taken with her in that far-off time, her youth. I wondered what Caro would say to such a gift. With Izzy holding up the hangings behind me like a maid holding her mistress’s train, we passed by the maze where I had been scolded by Caro, by the pond where Christopher Walshe had been fished up by the armpits that very morning, and along a stony track to the orchard.

      Zeb was not there. ‘He is sloth itself,’ I grumbled, all the while dreading the sight of him. We spread the hangings over some bushes until our brother should come up with the line. Izzy sat in the shade of a pear tree and began swishing about him with the beaters, as if killing flies. ‘This for me,’ he said, setting one apart from the rest. ‘Do you wish to choose?’

      ‘They’re all alike.’ Surely Zeb was lingering in the house expressly to torment me.

      ‘Not in the least,’ said Izzy. ‘This one is the fastest, and that the prettiest.’

      Sometimes, I reflected, my brother had odd notions: he had preferences in cups and candles as well as in the customary things like food and music, wherein each man has his particular taste. He had once told me that when we worked in the fields as children, every implement had for him its own character. But this was, after all, a small oddity. Apart from Caro, I loved Izzy better than anyone I knew, much more than I loved Zeb or my mother, perhaps because he never teased me.

      A whistle, full and liquid, drifted over the orchard among the songs of blackbirds and thrushes.

      ‘See, he is not so late,’ said Izzy the peacemaker.

      Zeb’s face, solemn, even strained, was oddly out of tune with his warbling of ‘There Lived a Pretty Maid’. He nodded to us, then began looping the rope he had brought over the apple boughs.

      ‘Higher,’ suggested Izzy. Zeb obeyed without question.

      ‘We are alone,’ I prompted him.

      ‘There.’ Zeb gave a final tweak to the line and turned to face us. ‘If someone comes, we put up the hangings.’

      ‘Yes, yes!’ My shirt was all damp. ‘But tell us, how did you break it to them at Champains?’

      ‘Godfrey gave me a note for the master. He – Mister Biggin – called me into his study and asked me was I sure, how was the lad, dark or fair – you know how it goes. In the end I did persuade him that what we have in the laundry is the earthly shell of Christopher Walshe.’

      ‘And did you say how he died?’

      ‘Drowned, of course. When you find a lad in a pond—’ he shrugged. ‘Would I had known about the stabbing. There will be more explanations tomorrow.’

      ‘Not from you, surely? You don’t think they suspect you?’ Izzy

      ‘Perhaps not of killing the boy.’ Zeb picked up the hanging on the top of the pile and laid it ready. ‘They kept asking me how we knew it was he, as if our knowing him were some proof of guilt.’

      I felt a twist of fear. ‘What did you say?’

      ‘I told them Godfrey knew him. That was nothing but truth, Godfrey did know him from when he was sent over there last year.’ Zeb took a beater (like me, not choosing for the beauty of it but merely seizing the nearest) and lashed out at the pallid face of Chastity, represented in the act of taming a unicorn.

      I took the next hanging and spread it over the line next to Zeb’s. ‘They suspect one of us, then.’

      He shot me an impatient look. ‘Would they tell me if they did?’

      ‘You said “Not of killing” him. But that’s the way they’re thinking. They’ll fasten on somebody, if not you, then—’

      ‘Listen, both of you.’ Zeb hit his tapestry again, sending a cloud of motes into the air. ‘Biggin had one of his tenants waiting in the corridor outside. When he brought him in, he called the man Tom Cornish.’

      I cried, ‘Not the intelligencer?’

      ‘The same.’

      Izzy and I spoke together: ‘What manner of man is he?’ and ‘What is he like?’

      ‘Grey-haired, with purplish cheeks. But if he were young, I’d say he was amazingly like Christopher Walshe.’

      I stiffened and felt Izzy do the same.

      ‘Cornish began crying right in front of me.’ Zeb waited for this to

      ‘The lad is – was – a nephew of his?’ faltered Izzy.

      ‘Closer.’

      I gasped.

      Izzy’s hand flew to his mouth. He stammered, ‘But – but why was he called Walshe?’

      ‘A bastard, I guess, brought up under the mother’s name until Cornish put him out to service.’

      ‘God СКАЧАТЬ