As Meat Loves Salt. Maria McCann

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       ONE Scum Rises

      On the morning we dragged the pond for Patience White, I bent so far down trying to see beneath the surface that my own face peered up at me, twisted and frowning. The three of us had churned up the water until it was half mud and spattered with flecks of weed before I knocked my foot against something loose and heavy that lolled about as we splashed. I tried to push it away from us, but too late.

      ‘It is she.’ Izzy’s lips were drawn back from his teeth.

      I shook my head. ‘That’s a log.’

      ‘No, Jacob – here, here—’

      He seized my hand and plunged it in the water near his right leg. My heart fairly battered my ribs. I touched first his ankle, then wet cloth wound tight around something which moved.

      ‘I think that’s an arm,’ Izzy said quietly.

      ‘I think it is, Brother.’ Feeling along it, I found cold slippery flesh, which I levered upwards to the air. It was certainly an arm, and at the end of it a small hand, wrinkled from the water. I heard My Lady, standing on the bank, cry out, ‘Poor girl, poor girl!’

      Zebedee reached towards the freckled fingers. ‘That’s never – Jacob, do you not see?’

      ‘Quiet.’ I had no need of his nudging, for I knew what we had hold of. Ever since we had been ordered to drag the pond I had been schooling myself for this.

      ‘You forget the rope,’ called Godfrey from the warm safety of the bank.

      I looked round and saw the end of it trailing in the water on the other side of the pond, while we floundered. ‘Fetch it, can’t you?’ I asked him.

      He pursed his lips and did not move. A mere manservant like me must not speak thus peremptorily to a steward, though he were hanging by his fingernails from a cliff.

      ‘Be so kind as to fetch it, Godfrey,’ put in the Mistress.

      Frowning, the steward took up the wet rope.

      The pond at Beaurepair had a runway sloping down into it on one side, made in past times to let beasts down into the water. It was coated with cracked greenish mud, which stank more foully than the pond itself. We grappled, splashing and squelching, to drag the thing to the bottom of this slope, then Zeb and I crawled to the top, our shirts and breeches clinging heavily to us. Having forgotten to take off my shoes, I felt them all silted up. Izzy, who lacked our strength, stayed in the water to adjust the ties.

      ‘Pull,’ he called.

      Zeb and I seized an end of rope each and leant backwards. Our weight moved the body along by perhaps two feet.

      ‘Come, Jacob, you can do better than that,’ called Sir John, as if we were practising some sport. I wondered how much wine he had got down his throat already.

      ‘Her clothes must be sodden,’ said Godfrey. He came over and joined Zeb on the line, taking care to stand well away from my brother’s dripping garments. ‘Or she’s caught on something—’

      There was a swirl in the water and a sucking noise. Izzy leapt back.

      The body sat up, breaking the surface. I saw a scalp smeared with stiffened hair. Then it plunged forwards as if drunk, sprawling full length in the shallower waters at the base of the runway. I descended again and took it under the arms, wrestling it up the slope until it lay face to the sky. The mouth was full of mud.

      ‘You see?’ whispered Zeb, wiping his brow.

      The corpse was not that of Patience Hannah White. Our catch was a different fish entirely: Christopher Walshe, late of this parish, who up to now had not even been missed.

      ‘He is the servant of Mr Biggin, Madam.’ Godfrey tried yet again, his beard wagging up and СКАЧАТЬ