As Meat Loves Salt. Maria McCann
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It means hanging.’
‘What, for a few pamphlets?’ She twined her arms round me. ‘Let me go to the Mistress. Let me beg mercy. Peter burnt all the papers – it is their word against ours—’
‘Take it from me, wife, we are tarred with the same stick.’
‘I can face it out!’
There was no light left in the wood. I knew what I had to do, and it was like sliding down ice in pitch darkness. I had stood on the brink of this slide for so long now I was come to desire it, was dangling the first foot over the edge. Better push off boldly, I thought, than crouch there forever.
‘Caro,’ I breathed into her neck. ‘It isn’t what you think.’
One foot on the ice.
‘Patience fled for fear of me. She’s out for blood, and Cornish too.’
Both feet.
Caro lifted her head. ‘You? You and Patience?’ Her voice was thick, stupid with baffled suspicion. ‘The child! You – you—’
‘No!’ I shouted, so hard that I hurt my throat. ‘Don’t you see it? Caro!’
‘Jacob, don’t—’
‘Caro, it was I killed Christopher Walshe.’
I had pushed off. The polished blackness of the slide dropped away to a place I could not see; I was falling out of life. Caro’s breath heaved and choked. Her body lay against mine rigid as a plank.
‘I heard noises and went down in the night. Cornish and Patience were in the garden by the maze, only I did not know who they were, then. I was listening. The boy jumped me.’
‘Why would he!’
‘I had not time to ask him,’ I retorted.
Caro’s breathing slowed a little. After a while she asked, ‘And Patience? Doing what?’
‘I told you, I did not see.’
‘You did not see,’ she repeated as if she had been there. ‘But you saw it was Patience.’
‘I saw a woman, and next day Patience was gone.’
‘Not true,’ Caro kept saying. ‘No.’
But it was true, and not the worst of the truth neither.
When first the boy leapt out to bar my way he took me unawares. I thought him a man, but then the moon coming out showed me the little fool standing about a yard off, waving his dagger. Though furious at his insolence, I laughed aloud. He was so easy; I had the knife off him and his arm twisted up his back before he could make one good pass with the blade.
‘Be quiet,’ I said, ‘and come along with me, or I’ll slit your throat.’ He came along like a lamb, and I marched him away from his friends, over to the large trees near the pond.
Not daring to call out, Walshe fell to whining for pardon. ‘O Jacob,’ says he, ‘you see it is only me, pray let me go,’ and all the time he was looking out for his father, but I had taken care to get the trees between us and any help that might come to him. At last he fell silent, gaping at me much as he had gaped from the protection of my brother’s arm.
‘What of dear Zeb?’ I mocked. ‘Not here, is he?’
The moonlight showed me tears on Walshe’s cheeks. He was panting with fear, breast rising and falling beneath his white shirt. Show him, said the Voice, what becomes of a boy who insults a man.
‘Well, little warrior.’ I pushed him up against the tree and pressed my left hand hard over his mouth, and just tickled his belly with the point of the knife before driving it in. He tried to push away my arm with both of his but could not, and his struggles were so feeble that the savage fit in me was still not worked off. I pulled the knife down and out, and feeling my fingers warm and wet from the blood, I said to him, ‘Let us see what Jacob will do now.’
Twisting his arm again to keep him in front of me, lest he bleed on my coat, I wrestled him over to the pond. On seeing where we were headed he turned his face to look up into my eyes, and I tightened my grip on his mouth, and smiled and nodded. By the time we got there he was very weak, and too confused to call out when he got his chance. I held him by the legs into the deep water at the side of the runway. There was not even much splashing.
‘It was dark,’ I pleaded to Caro. ‘Else I should never – I took him for a robber—’
My wife clamped her hands to her ears.
‘Caro, hear me.’ I reached up and prised the hands away.
‘You put him in the pond! O you should have brought him back – fetched a surgeon—’
‘Too late, he was dead. I thought to hide the corpse. Besides, he was a Judas, they all of them meant us harm—’
Caro cried, ‘O what do I care what they meant!’
‘I am telling you how it was!’
‘You killed him. And here have I been—’ She began weeping again, a breathless, driven sob. ‘Here have I been – wondering – if I drove Patience away. We had words that day.’
‘Do you hear me? Patience—’
‘Patience saw it.’ Caro’s voice was become a lash. ‘And for that she left, and returned.’
For once her quick understanding struck fear into me.
‘Who knows? Possibly she heard.’ I tried to keep my voice calm.
‘All this because he spoke against you!’
‘Not for that, not at all,’ I said. ‘You don’t listen.’ I tried to put my arm around her but she rolled off me and lay by my side. ‘Caro, I was set on in the dark, Walshe set on me—’
There was a scuffling in the leaves and Caro spoke from somewhere above my head. ‘I am going back to Beaurepair.’
‘Don’t you understand?’ I was exasperated: there she stood as if nothing had happened. ‘You cannot go back.’
‘I shall try whether I can or no.’
‘You read the pamphlets and stole the gold with the rest of us,’ I answered. ‘As for Walshe, I did it for you. He would have—’
‘Did it for me!’ Caro screamed. There was a sharp pain in my side: she had kicked out, and not in jest. ‘When you didn’t know what he was! How, for me?’
My side throbbed. ‘Another kick,’ I promised, ‘and you’ll wish you hadn’t.’
‘Don’t ever say you did it for—’
‘Enough! The thing is done. You stay here,’ and I sprang up.
Caro leapt back, panting. ‘You let me contract myself to you.’
‘You cannot go back,’ I hissed. ‘Do you want us to be taken?’
‘You were keeping ahold of me until the betrothal. I don’t know you, O God, God help me.’
‘O but you do know me, Mistress.’ I stepped forward to where her voice had been, but found she had moved further off. I heard her pushing through branches. Then a frenzied whisper: ‘Zeb, Zeb! Zeb, wake, please, O God, Zeb—’
I closed in on her voice as it floated upwards from where she crouched over my brother’s body. There was a faint slapping sound which I took for her patting his face. Zeb groaned once or twice, and Caro shrieked, ‘He’s here! He’s—’
I was upon her before she had time for more. Pawing my brother like that, calling myself, her lawful husband, He…! I dragged her upright by the hair and forced her along with me, ignoring