As Meat Loves Salt

They were both of them deluded. He would never be anything but fickle, tasting one love and flying on to another. There had been a tramping woman, older than himself and no innocent, when he was but fifteen: I had caught Peter letting him in late at night, flushed and exhilarated. Being once alerted by Izzy, I had observed Zeb’s steady heating of Patience, who was only too hot already: his tickling her, putting the point of his tongue in her ear, and generally laying siege to that tottering fort, her virtue. Whenever I saw him at it, rage choked me. Had he been younger, and under my authority, I would have prescribed him a beating.

Back indoors, I again took up the tray and went on with my scouring, pressing the grains of sand against the pewter until each dish would have passed, at a distance, for silver. Near me sat Izzy, scraping teasels over Sir Bastard’s coat to raise the nap.

‘That will have to do.’ He stood and held up the garment. ‘What do you think?’

‘You’ve wrought marvels with it.’

‘It stinks of wine. God, how the man slobbers and sicks!’ He threw it aside. It was not like my brother to let ill temper gain on him and I saw in his petulance how weary he was.

‘The house is quiet without Zeb,’ I ventured.

‘Why do they keep him so long!’ Izzy moaned. ‘Is he suspected?’

‘No reason he should be.’ I rinsed the pewter clear of sand and began drying the pieces on a cloth. At that moment the sound of rapid footsteps came to us from the corridor. With a quick glance at me, Izzy ran to the doorway and looked out. I heard someone whispering and saw him gesture in reply. He closed the door and came back to where I was stacking the dishes.

‘That was Caro. Zeb’s back.’

‘Has he seen the Master yet?’

Izzy shrugged. We left the scullery and made our way to the hall, where we found our brother in council with Godfrey.

‘If the Mistress would be so good,’ Zeb was saying.

Godfrey listened judicially, nodding from time to time. ‘I will inform her. And when does he expect to have the cart, did you say?’

‘Tomorrow. O, and he asks that the boy’s friends here may be let go to the funeral.’

‘We shall see,’ the steward answered, frowning. The frown meant nothing, for Godfrey had never been known to grant anything on the first request and we would most likely get a half-holiday if we wished it. For my part I had just as lief stay home.

‘That is all the message he sent,’ Zeb prompted.

‘Thank you, Zebedee. Now, have you and your brothers sufficient work?’

‘Were we not to beat the hangings?’

‘Indeed. Pray do so.’ Godfrey turned and strode towards My Lady’s parlour. I groaned inwardly, for if there was one task I detested, beating hangings was it. ‘In God’s name, why remind him of that?’ I muttered as the door closed after the steward.

‘I want to talk to you both, out in the orchard. Anyway, Jacob, we should have to do them some day soon, so why wait until it rains?’

‘What 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.