Free The Serpent Garden - Judith Merkle Riley Page B

not
there
. If everyone is talking about our story, they might not notice hers.” Together they burned the bloody straw of the birth mattress and then went out to bribe the sexton at Saint Vedast’s to have it buried in an unmarked grave in the corner of the churchyard. But even dead, that ugly thing went on bringing evil. There was a fire in the church porch that was barely put out in time to save the whole building on the night that the sexton buried it. And it was the last baby that Goody Forster’s strong hands ever delivered, because the very next day, she died in an accident when several heavy tiles came loose from a roof and fell on her just as she was passing beneath. Then I knew that I was cursed, because this ghastly work of my inmost self had wrought such monstrous things in the world.
    My husband’s funeral, with all its pomp, turned out to be a great mistake. Master Dallet, having been buried as he lived, beyond his means, played his final trick on me, in spite of all that I had striven to remake him in my mind as much kinder and more loving. Before the memorial brass was even placed in the wall at Saint Vedast, his creditors determined that he must have been wealthy after all due to the splendor of the arrangements which I had provided and not even got to partake of. I was still bedridden when the first of them arrived, the apothecary from whom he bought his colors. From the remains of the three pounds, I paid him, for he was an honest man and besides he had a sad face and twelve children and a sick wife, he said.
    Then came the tavern owners, the whoremasters, and the gamesters, and with each one I discovered more about my dead husband’s secret life. By the time the goldsmith came to reclaim the setting of a ring unpaid for, I shouted at him, “Go collect it from his whore, Mistress Pickering!” and Nan added, “You ought to be ashamed, hounding a poor widow who has just lost her only child,” as he departed down the stairs. By that time, all the money was gone, including the purse from the guilty captain.
    “Oh, dear, oh, dear, they’re swarming like flies,” said Mistress Hull, who had come to see how I was. “I just saw a notary and a draper go down the stairs. Any more up here?”
    “Not just now,” I muttered.
    “Well, Mistress Littleton, from hard experience I can tell you it’s time we hid Mistress Dallet’s paints and personal things, or the creditors will have them all. How can she paint for us if there’s nothing left?” So the two of them went to work, carrying the lengths of fine black wool, the sewing things, the easels, table, and paints down the stairs. It was a task that suited her, for it allowed her to inspect our household goods even more closely than before.
    “What’s this chest? It looks terribly heavy. Foreign, isn’t it? My, that’s nice brasswork.”
    “It’s Flemish. They do things fancier there. Let’s try to take it. Get your Cat to help. Maybe if we empty it we can get it down the stairs.” So then they had to empty it out and put all my husband’s good portrait drawings right on the floor, which seemed something of a sacrilege but not as much of a one as putting my special books,
The Most Esteemed Life of the Holy Virgin and Mother of God
and
The Good Wyfe’s Book of Manners
, right there too, even if they were on top of the drawings.
    “Now what’s this bit of a book here? It hasn’t even got any cover,” Nan said. I squinted at the thing. It was all wiggly handwriting that no normal person could read even if it were in English, which it wasn’t. But it was the highest grade of unborn parchment, and the margins were very wide, just like new, with only the faintest touch of mildew on one corner.
    “Oh, Master Dallet would bring home old trash! Good for nothing. Throw it out, Susanna.”
    “It’s very good vellum. He must have got it for that, to scrape it down and reuse it. Father always said that was a stingy trick.” Suppose some more