‘We are made, you know.’ Caro squeezed my arm. ‘She’d let none but me have this chamber.’
‘True,’ I answered her. ‘But when Sir John dies, and he does his best to bring it about, it will be Sir Bastard in the saddle. He’s itching to debauch the maids.’
She sniffed. ‘Do you not think I might refuse?’
‘Would you had heard the talk in March, my love, when he brought his cronies and I waited on their late-night drunks. How the amorous propensities are heated by struggle, and not struggle in play neither.’
‘Ah.’ Her face sobered. ‘He’s one you have to watch, certes.’
‘What, has he touched—’
‘No, Jacob! He does no more than look. While his father lives, we should stick here. I am laying by money.’
‘Are you sorry to change your first bridesmaid?’ I asked. We had been forced in courtesy to ask Patience to carry out the first bridesmaid’s duties, decking our chamber and the rest with flowers against the day, since neither of us had a sister or cousin who could decently claim precedence.
‘Only if she be really lost,’ Caro said. ‘But there will be two bridesmaids. Peter’s sister Mary will take Anne’s place and Anne will stand in for Patience.’ She smiled at me as if to say, Fear not, all will be done.
I eyed the heathens in their painted Heaven. Soon they would look down on our embracings, and I promised them good sport. Though I had never had a woman I understood perfectly what to do, and had an edge on me keen as a new blade: she would not find me shy or cold. We would sleep wrapped in one another, and wake to—
I caught Caro’s eyes on me and flushed.
‘The place will be sweet with all the flowers they can find,’ she said. ‘There were more in July, but—’
The door swung open, making me jump. It was Zeb. I expected a grin and the inevitable jest about inspecting the bed but his face was rapt as if from some vision.
‘Jacob, I heard—’ he corrected himself, ‘and Caro – I heard something they kept from us—’
‘Is Patience found?’ cried Caro.
‘No, Sister. Listen. Sir Bastard was in the West, was he not?’
‘What’s that to us?’ I demanded. ‘What care we where he is, so be’s not here?’
‘Jacob, Parliament has gained Bristol.’
I whistled.
‘That’s why he’s been so curst of late,’ Zeb went on excitedly. ‘He’s come home with his tail between his legs.’
‘When was it?’ Caro asked.
‘The tenth of September. That’s the fourth in a row: Naseby, Lang-port, Bridgwater and now Bristol.’
‘They are going to win,’ I said. My brother and wife-to-be stared back at me, unspeaking.
‘I heard him telling the Mistress about it,’ said Zeb at last. His eyes shone. ‘They are all frighted now. There were stores lost from the whole of the West at Bridgwater, and Fairfax got between the King’s army and Bristol.’
‘And took Bristol itself! O brave Fairfax!’ I could have capered with glee. ‘To put down their precious Rupert.’
This prince was the King’s own nephew, and had sworn to hold that city for His Majesty. There were many who considered him a kind of evil spirit, for he was monstrous tall and fearless in battle. What was more, he had been seen to converse with a familiar in the shape of a white dog, and though this dog had been killed at Marston Moor, yet the man continued cunning beyond mortal power. Once, I had overheard some guests say at table that had the King but been advised by Rupert, the upstarts and the common sort would have been crushed utterly. Now Fairfax had crushed him.
‘We are going to see new times,’ murmured Zeb. ‘But fields of dead, first.’ He turned to go out, pausing at the door to add, ‘They slit women’s faces at Naseby.’
‘Lord protect us from the Cavaliers!’ Caro gasped.
‘It wasn’t the Cavaliers did it, Sister.’ Zeb cocked an eyebrow and was gone.
I pictured a face slit across. The blade would rip up lips and cheeks, catch in the gristle of a septum on its way to the eyes. Caro was saying something but I could hear nothing of it for the pounding in the back of my head. Suddenly my father spoke there and in my breast all at once, saying, I have pursued mine enemies, and destroyed them; and turned not again until I had consumed them.
Amen, I answered him in my heart. It was needless speaking aloud, for I had found over the years that he made himself known only to me, and though the Voice might shake the flesh on my bones, yet none but myself could hear it.
The night before my wedding I was restless, jostling and kicking poor Izzy until at last he pinched me. There are few things so lonely as watching while others sleep; I lit a candle and stretched out on my back, staring round the room and thinking how odd it was that I should never again lie there. The ceiling in our chamber was unpainted, but its plainness was crazed and fissured into shapes like those seen in clouds or maps, the surface throwing up ridges and crevices as the yellow light lapped against them. A smudge in the far corner was a cobweb which had been spun in Patience’s absence, and over the bed there was the familiar three-branched crack which I had seen every morning and night since we left Mother’s cottage in the village.
Zeb had told me he could not remember our old house, with its pear trees and the lozenges, gules et noir, set in the window of the room where we slept as boys and where perhaps young brothers might be sleeping now while the Cullens, dispossessed, stewed in a fusty servants’ chamber at Beaurepair.
Zeb. I had spoken gently to him, and he to me. I judged my brother and myself to be natural opposites, blended of quite different humours, yet as I lay there something I had not thought on in years came back to my mind, and ruffled it. When first we moved to the big house, Zeb and I slept together in the bed I now shared with Izzy. My elder brother turned in with Stephen, a lad who was since dead of eating tainted meat, and it seemed to me that there had been kindness between Zeb and myself. On saints’ days (the Mistress still kept these, and though heathen they were not unwelcome to us servants) I had been fishing, and swimming, with him; I was sure it was Zeb, and not Izzy, who had once made me laugh so hard that beer came out of my nose and I was sent down from table. Was it when Stephen died, and Peter came, that my brothers had changed places in the chamber? It might be that Izzy had wanted the change, for Peter snored in tiny grunts like a dreaming dog; but Zeb and I were never the same again. He withdrew from me; I began to find him wilful and spoilt.
Our room was that night too hot, as it was most nights from April to October, and the grey of dawn showed that, though the casement was open, mist beaded the inner panes. The scent of hard-worked bodies hung in the air like the whiff of some disagreeable mushroom and I wondered how many pints of sweat I had breathed in over the years, along with essences of feet and farts and garlic. My Lady’s grand chamber smelt of rose otto and occasionally, when Sir John had paid his wife a visit, of wine, while the room set aside for myself and Caro had as yet no perfume but emptiness and dust. I turned over and sniffed the pillow, finding my own smell mingled with Izzy’s, and thought, Clean linen for us tomorrow, and for some reason the red glass came to mind.
When our young master, as we called him in the presence of Godfrey, might be fifteen and myself perhaps some two years older, a Venetian visitor brought