Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [83]
More than any husband or lover or child; more than anyone I have hurt since I went into exile; more than anyone I left without warning (when they wondered why I was not ageing) or killed with my bare hands (when they deserved it). Petronilla's is the only death I still regret. Leaving her behind was the worst thing I have ever done.
I did no harm to my first husband, the richest moneylender in Kilkenny; I bore him a son and fed him tidbits of roast rabbit on his deathbed. As for my second—in my grandmother's time I could have followed the old ways and left him after a year and a day, but under Common Law I was his for life, to stamp his mark on. I bent under his weight like a reed, and in the pool of humiliation I brushed against my power. He was sick already—the beatings were getting feebler—but the poison sped him on. My third ... yes, I remember. I despatched him in a night, after I caught him in the linen cupboard ripping the skirt off Petronilla. The night before his funeral I dropped his heart in the River Nore.
As for my fourth, John le Poer, he was a loving man who shut his ears to the rumours circulating about me. But by then, you must understand, I had signed with my own blood, and the sacrifice was called for. His hair came out in handfuls, when I brushed it at night; his nails began to bend backwards. Petronilla never claimed to understand the rituals, but she knew that whatever Dame Alice said had to happen. When John, made suspicious at last by the gossip of my dead husbands' disinherited children, talked to Bishop Ledrede, it was my faithful maid, my flawless echo, who repeated to me every word they had said. When my husband wrenched the key from my belt and burst into my room, finding and forcing open the padlocked boxes, I kept one curious eye on Petronilla. She wept because the story was almost over, but she showed no shame.
I was charged along with eleven accomplices, most of whom barely knew me to see. The seven charges told of dogs torn limb from limb and scattered at crossroads, fornication with Ethiopian hobgoblins, and a dead baby's flesh boiled in a robber's skull. The grease I used to keep my face soft was listed as a sorcerous ointment for the staff on which I flew across Kilkenny town by night. Bishop Ledrede was widely read, and had a vivid imagination. He was not to know that power is composed of simple elements, once you have stumbled across it.
Ledrede did not prosecute me for the money his spiritual court could hope to confiscate; like myself, he was motivated by wrath and glory. And so, when I had indicted him for defamation and sailed to England with all my jewels, when my son William had agreed to pay for the reroofing of St. Canice's as a penance, and when the other accused accomplices had melted into the night, then the Bishop focused his gaze on Petronilla. She was all he had left.
It was not that I could not have brought her with me, torn her out of prison somehow; I simply never thought to. That is my crime: that in the urgency of my flight, full of the sense of my own devilish importance, I did not even condemn my maid deliberately, but carelessly, as I might have said, "Pick up that sarsenet gown."
I have had plenty of time to think of her since. In almost seven centuries of wandering I can make an informed comparison: I have met no one who loved so well or was so betrayed. She was not a natural killer: she ground poisons together out of mute loyalty, and what purer motive is there than that?
It is so long since I have killed, I have almost forgotten how. It is not worth risking nowadays. They lock you up, take down what you say, and never put an end to it. Oh Petronilla, how I envy your death. Not the manner of it, the pain and squalor, but its definition. How it took you by the hand and led you away before your bursting youth could dwindle.
Unless I am casting a web of glamour over the story to lessen my guilt? But that is not how it works. My envy and my guilt pin each other down. Petronilla's,