P. Chisholm - A Season of Knives

Mr Nixon’s face looked very odd and he stood still for a long while. He looked angry and afraid at the same time.

‘Me dad’s still asleep,’ she said helpfully. ‘He wouldna wake when mam yelled for him. She said he’d drunk too much last night.’

‘Did he, by God?’ said Mr Nixon in a nasty voice. He put his left hand on his dagger hilt and made the lift and drop movement that even Mary knew was the prelude to a fight. She took the arm that wasn’t in a sling and started pulling him after her.

‘Ye must come, Mr Nixon, please,’ she said. ‘Me mam’s very upset, her face is as white as her apron, it is so, and she wouldna show me the new stitch like she promised, so please come.’

Mr Nixon’s face took on a new set of lines under the bruising, his lips went all thin and into a straight line.

‘Ay,’ he said. ‘I will.’

In the end, she couldn’t keep up with him because he strode ahead of her forgetting her short legs and petticoats. She scooped them all up in an immodest bunch and ran as fast as she could and reached their door just as he did, completely out of breath. Her mam opened the door without him knocking and let him in without a word, putting down a big basket of soiled sheets.

‘I did it, mam,’ she said plaintively. ‘I did the Message.’

Her mam looked at her vaguely as if not seeing her. ‘Go help Julia with the buttermaking,’ she said, as if Mary had not just delivered an important message for her. Mary was thinking about crying again, but Mr Nixon did a sort of smile for her and nodded. ‘I’ll give ye the money for a penny bun if ye go off like a good lass now,’ he said, so she held out her hand and after a pause he put the penny in it and she trotted off to the scullery where the paddle in the milk was finally beginning to make the plunk plunk noises that heralded butter. Perhaps she could get some buttermilk to drink as well.

Kate Atkinson blinked at Andy Nixon for several seconds after her daughter had gone. Her mind seemed not to be working properly, or at least it was some while behind what her eyes saw. She didn’t look as if Atkinson had beaten her, or he had kept away from her face if he had. She frowned suddenly.

‘Andy, what happened to your face…and your arm?’ she asked.

‘What d’ye think, Kate?’

‘I…don’t know.’

‘Och, work it out, woman.’

‘Did something fall on you?’

Andy Nixon managed a mirthless smile. ‘In a manner of speaking. Four men, if ye want to know.’

‘What?’

‘Your husband paid four men to beat me last night.’

It seemed impossible but her face grew whiter. Both hands went to her mouth.

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘Ay,’ agreed Andy. ‘Ah was comin’ to tell ye we canna go on; I willnae come to see ye any more. Not for a while, any road. I’m going back to my father.’

Well, he hadn’t expected her to like it, but whatever he had expected it wasn’t a peculiar high-pitched little laugh.

She saw it frightened him, so she swallowed hard and took a deep breath.

‘Come and see him,’ she said, taking his good arm and leading him to the stairs.

‘Kate, are ye mad? I dinna wantae see him. After what he had done to me last night, I willna be responsible for what I…’

‘Oh, shut yer clamour and come wi’ me,’ snapped Kate. ‘Ye’ll understand when ye see him.’

He did indeed. While Mary had done her message, Kate had already stripped the sheets off the bed, but left her husband half wrapped in the worst-stained blanket. Dead bodies were nothing new to Andy Nixon, but he had never before seen anyone grinning so nastily from his throat, with all severed tubes and the like showing as if he were a slaughtered pig.

Kate bolted the door behind him as he took in the scene. It was all too much for his aching head and aching body. He sat down on the clothes chest beside a tray of cold porridge, and put his face in his hand.

‘Oh, good Christ,’ he croaked.

‘Ay,’ she said. ‘What am I to do?’

‘What happened?’ he asked eventually, with a horrible cold suspicion fully formed in his heart. Atkinson had boasted of what he had done to his wife’s lover and his wife had taken a knife and…

‘Why? D’ye think I did it?’ Kate’s voice was shaking. ‘I left him as alive as you are, and after I’d milked the cow and skimmed the cream for Julia and made the porridge and seen to the children and sent them off to school, I came back and this is what I saw. And…and the blood all over everywhere.’

He was still staring at her and for all his trying, she saw the doubt in his eyes. Her hands clenched into her apron.

‘As God is my witness,’ she said, very low and intense. ‘I did not kill my husband.’

‘Ay,’ he said, still not able to deal with it. Kate laughed that high silly noise again.

‘I was going to ask ye if ye’d done it yourself,’ she said.

Andy’s mouth fell open and he felt sick. He hadn’t thought of that, but there was no denying the fact that he had wanted the little bastard dead as well.

‘But I didna,’ he said.

‘No more did I,’ she told him.

The two of them stared at each other while each could see the other wondering and wondering. Finally, Kate Atkinson made a helpless gesture and turned back to the corpse.

‘Well, he’s dead now. What’s to be done?’

‘I…I suppose I’d best get Sir Richard Lowther, and tell Fenwick to come for the body and…’

She whirled back to face him with her fists clenched. ‘For God’s sake, Andy, think!’ she hissed at him. ‘Who d’ye think they’ll say did it? You and me, for sure. You think the women round about here havenae seen us? Well, they have and they’ll delight in making sure Lowther knows the lot, and the Warden too. They won’t know how it was done for sure, but they’ll know I was in the house and that ye would likely be angry with him. What do ye think will happen? We’re not reivers, ye’re only Mr Pennycook’s rent collector and I’m just a woman. You’ll hang and I’ll burn.’

‘Burn?’ he said stupidly.

‘Ay. Burn. For petty treason. If you kill a man, Andy Nixon, and ye’re caught, that’s murder and you’ll hang for it. If a woman kills her husband, that’s no’ just murder, it’s petty treason. They hang, draw and quarter you for high treason and they burn ye for petty treason. So now.’

Andy Nixon was not a bad man, but neither was he a very clever one. He was broad and strong and quick in a fight, and he could withstand injuries that would have put a weaker man in bed, which was the only reason he could walk at all that morning. But thinking was not what he was paid to do by Mr Pennycook and, generally speaking, he left that to his betters. He gazed at the corpse and his mind was utterly blank.

‘Well?’ asked Kate Atkinson. ‘We canna leave him there. What shall we do?’

‘I don’t know.’ He blinked and bit the hard skin of his knuckles. ‘I could likely say it was me did it, and ye knew nothing of it and then I’d hang but ye wouldna burn,’ he offered as the best he could come up with.

Kate Atkinson looked at him for a moment with her mouth open. He shrugged and tried to smile.

‘I canna think of anything else,’ he explained sadly. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

She suddenly put her arms round him and held him tight. He put his good arm about her shoulders and felt the juddering as she wept into his shoulder, but she was holding him too hard and it hurt his bruises, so he whispered, ‘Mind me ribs, Kate. I’m not feeling myself this morning.’

She lifted her head up and wiped her tears with her apron. ‘You’re Mr Pennycook’s man,’ she said, still sniffling. ‘Would he be a good lord to ye, d’ye think?’