Read Chapter 14: The Poxed Lamb's Congregation

The Poxed Lamb stank of woodsmoke, stale ale, and fear. Thomas had smelled that particular blend before, in other villages, other plagues. It was the smell of people who had stopped trusting each other and started listening to the walls.

He shuffled through the low doorway with his shoulders hunched and his hair hanging in greasy ropes over his face. The clothes he’d stolen from the labourer were too big, and he’d smeared mud up his arms and over his cheeks until he looked less like a physician and more like a man who slept in ditches. Which, he reflected, was precisely what he had done the night before.

He kept his eyes low, but his gaze swept the room. Four tables. A fire that burned too hot for the season. A dozen men and women, most of them nursing cups of thin ale as if the drinking were a duty, not a pleasure. No one looked at him twice.

He took a stool near the back, where the smoke from the fire curled against the rafters and the shadow of a roof beam cut across his face. A serving girl came to him—young, hollow-eyed, moving like a bird that expected a stone—and he asked for the cheapest cup she had. She nodded and was gone.

Thomas listened.

Two men at the nearest table were arguing about the harvest. One of them, a carter with a broken thumbnail that he kept picking at, said the barley had rotted in the fields and it didn’t matter anyway because no one would be alive to eat it come winter. The other man laughed, but it was a short, sharp sound, more like a dog’s yelp.

“You’re a cheerful bastard, Pierson,” he said.

“Cheerful as the grave, I am,” Pierson answered. He picked at his thumbnail and leaned forward. “Haven’t you noticed? Every night, they take another one. New graves every morning in the churchyard. But I count deaths, I do. Always have. That’s my trade—carts, coffins, what have you. And I’ll tell you something, Master Goode. We bury more than we die.”

Goode shifted on his bench. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Means the quartern’s count don’t match the graves. We lost old Mother Haskett last week. She was ninety if she was a day. They buried her proper, with a service. But we also buried the smith’s boy, and I don’t remember him dying, do you?”

Goode went very still. “The plague takes them quick.”

“The plague takes them quiet, too, does it?” Pierson shook his head. “I carted a body for Sir Richard’s men three nights ago. Told to take it to the marsh, not the graveyard. Paid in silver. Not going to complain about silver, but I’m telling you and you can make of it what you will.”

Thomas kept his face slack, staring into the middle distance like a man who had lost all interest in the world. But his ears were sharp. The carter had taken plague barrels to the marsh. How many others had done the same without knowing what they carried?

The serving girl returned with a cup of ale so weak it was barely more than brown water. Thomas paid with a few coins he’d been saving since Marlborough and let the girl see his palms. She didn’t look at them. She was too tired to look at anyone’s hands.

He let the ale sit in front of him and kept listening.

The tavern door opened, and a gust of cold air blew in with a woman. She was young, maybe twenty, but she wore black from head to foot—the deepest mourning rags Thomas had seen since entering the village. Her face was raw, red-rimmed eyes that she did not bother to hide. She walked to the bar and the serving girl fetched her a cup without being asked, as if she were a regular.

The room’s murmur dipped when she entered. Men looked at their cups. Women looked at the floor. She took her drink and moved to the back corner, where she sat alone, facing the door.

Thomas watched her from the corner of his eye. Widow’s weeds. She was young to be a widow.

A man near the fire—a big man with a labourer’s shoulders and farmer’s sunburn—cleared his throat too loudly and said, “Still planting flowers, is she? Up at the churchyard?”

His companion, a wiry man with a squint, laughed. “Every night, they say. Poor lady’s gone soft in the head.”

“Wouldn’t you be? Husband taken by the flux one day, buried the next. She saw him laid low in the morning and in the ground by nightfall. There’s no sense to it. No rhyme. Just the pox and the grave.”

“Not the pox,” the squint-eyed man said, lowering his voice. “I heard it was the sweating sickness. Took him that fast.”

The big man shook his head. “The priest said it was the plague.”

“The priest says whatever Sir Richard tells him to say.”

The two men went quiet then, as if they had said too much. One of them glanced toward the door, then toward the bar. Thomas noted the glance. That one was worried, not loyal. A man who watched for authority would also crumble before it.

But there was another man in the corner, sitting alone with a cup of wine rather than ale. He was well-dressed for a village tavern—leather doublet, clean boots, a silver ring on his finger. He hadn’t moved since Thomas entered. He watched everyone the way Sir Richard’s men had watched the church. Thomas marked him as the man to avoid.

The weeping widow rose from her corner and walked out into the night without a word to anyone. The door swung shut behind her. A moment later, a woman at the next table leaned to her companion and whispered, “She’ll be at the grave again. Poor thing. I’d not step foot in that churchyard after dark, not for all the silver in London.”

“She lost her husband to the plague,” her companion replied. “Grief does strange things.”

Thomas swirled his cup of water-thin ale and thought about what the carter had said. We bury more than we die. The crypt beneath the chapel was full of bodies that must never be examined. He had seen it himself. And the widow went to the churchyard alone, every night, unchallenged.

What did she know that he didn’t?

He finished his ale and rose from the table, leaving the cup where it stood. As he moved toward the door, he passed close to the man in the corner—the well-dressed one with the silver ring. The man’s eyes flicked to him, cold and assessing.

Thomas let himself stumble, caught the edge of the table, and mumbled an apology in a slurred voice. The man’s lip curled and he looked away.

Thomas stepped out into the cold night air and pulled the labourer’s coat tight around his shoulders. Behind him, the light from the Poxed Lamb’s windows spilled gold across the mud. Inside, he could hear the murmur of voices, the low hum of fear and drink and half-spoken truths.

He knew now that the village was not one thing. There were men like Pierson the carter, who saw too much and kept silent because silver quieted their tongues. There were men like the big farmer, whose jokes could not hide the doubt in his eyes. And there were men like the one in the corner—watchers, loyal to their master. And there was the widow, who walked to the churchyard every night.

She had been walking away from the tavern, toward the east. The church was in that direction. Thomas wrapped his fingers around the ledger hidden inside his shirt—the pages growing soft and creased from his sweat—and followed her into the dark.

The ground was slick with rain that had fallen while he was inside. He kept to the shadows, his steps soft, following the faint white of her mourning veil as she moved between the low houses. She did not stop. She did not look back. She walked with the purpose of a woman who had made the same journey many times before.

The churchyard wall rose ahead. A small gate at the side, older than the one Lord Malton used to enter his sanctuary. She pushed it open and stepped inside.

Thomas stopped at the wall, pressing his back against the cold stone. He heard her footsteps stop somewhere beyond the gate. Then silence. Then a soft, muffled sound—not a sob, but something worse. A sound squeezed through a throat too tired for tears.

He moved to the gate and looked through.

She was kneeling before a small grave near the yew tree—a fresh burrow of turned earth, no marker yet, only a little wooden cross. In her hand she clutched a flower, something white and fragile, grown out of season.

Thomas stepped through the gate and approached her. He did not try to move quietly. She heard him. Her head snapped up, and in the moonlight he saw her face—not grief-stricken, but terrified. Terrified the way a person is when their secret is about to be found out.

“Please,” she said, her voice cracking. “I’m not doing any harm. I’m just leaving a flower for my husband.”

Thomas stood over her. “Your husband,” he said softly, “was not buried in this grave.”

The flower trembled in her grip. She said nothing, but her silence was an admission.

“I saw the crypt under the church,” Thomas said. “I saw what they keep there. I know your husband wasn’t taken by the plague.”

Her eyes widened. For a moment, he thought she would scream. Then the fear in her face changed—became something sharper. Something like hope.

She looked up at him. “Who are you?”

Thomas extracted the ledger from his shirt. Its cracked leather cover caught the moonlight.

“My name is Thomas Blackwood,” he said. “And I intend to burn this village’s corruption to the ground.”

Her mouth fell open. And in the silence of the churchyard, beneath the yew tree’s reaching branches, she began, very softly, to cry.