Page 29 of The Changeling

The queen gazed at him blankly. ‘I don’t understand. The body of an infant? You mean … a dead body? A dead baby?’

‘Aye. The gardeners found it in a pile of rubbish in the abbey. A tiny wee thing, it cannot have been more than an hour old when it died.’

I swallowed. I had heard the baby wailing. Had I heard it die too? The crying had stopped so abruptly. I remembered the shudder of cold I had felt, the way Carlin had dug up the rubbish heap in the abbey. Had the figure in the black hooded cloak hidden the dead baby there? I imagined finding its body, and felt sick.

‘A dead baby was buried in the abbey?’ Mary had one hand pressed to her mouth. ‘But who would do such a thing? How did the baby die?’

‘It seems it was drowned.’

‘Drowned?’

‘Aye. Enquiries have been made. One of your maids-in-waiting has confessed to the murder. She gave birth to the child in the ruins, and then drowned it in a rainwater barrel.’

The queen was deathly pale. ‘But … why would she do such an appalling thing?’

‘She said she did not know what else to do.’

‘I cannot believe it!’

‘There is worse,’ Lord James said.

‘How could it be any worse?’ Mary sounded dazed.

‘The father of the babe is your apothecary. A Frenchman, and married to boot. So, an adulterer, as well as a fornicator. You dismissed the proclamation against such sinners that Pastor Knox formulated this month, and he will preach most fiercely against you as a result.’

Mary frowned and pressed her lips together.

‘You must condemn your maid-in-waiting and her lover to death.’ ‘To death?’ She looked up, startled. ‘But …’

‘You have no choice. She murdered her own newborn child, and condemned it to hell. You cannot pardon a crime such as this! Pastor Knox has already told the Lords of the Congregation that yours is a loose and licentious court …’

‘How dare he? In what way is my court licentious?’

‘One of your maids conceived a child out of wedlock, with a man who was already married, then killed the babe and buried it in the abbey,’ Lord James replied dryly.

The queen shrank back. ‘I did not know. I swear I had no idea. Pastor Knox cannot blame me – how was I to know?’

‘Pastor Knox will no doubt think you should have known. Madam, you must listen to me, you must do as I say. You do not know the power of the man. I have here the order of execution. You must sign it!’

The next day, the maid-in-waiting and her lover were hanged near St Giles Kirk.

I thought a lot about God over the next few weeks.

God had always been a constant presence in our lives. Before every meal, Nan would bid us hold hands as she asked for blessings on our food. She always ended, ‘And if there is any poor creature hungry walking the road, may God send them to us so that we can share the food with them, just as Christ shares His gifts with all of us. Amen.’

The God that had been revealed to me since I had fled home was not the God I knew. I had been a poor hungry creature walking the roads, and not one person had shared a bite with me. In his sermon, Pastor Knox had said God rotted the king of France’s ear. That was a terrible thing to have done. And now a desperate young woman had preferred to drown her newborn child, rather than face the shame and humiliation of being drawn through the city in the dung cart, wearing naught but her shift, the Kirk’s preferred punishment for adultery. It seemed so wrong.

I had been so heartsore and weary in my journey to Edinburgh, I had not thought much beyond how to hide myself from sight, and how to stay alive as winter closed its jaws on the land. But now I was safe in the queen’s court, I had all the time in the world to think, and to worry, and to try to understand what I was.

If God had made everything, then He must have made faeries too. But faeries were cruel and dangerous. They curdled butter and tangled horses’ manes just for fun. If you spoke ill of them, they cursed you with dumbness or paralysis, turned you into a pig, or stole you away to the Otherworld. There were dozens of protective measures against the faeries – salt and iron, rowan and amber, holy water and the sign of the cross. The faery queen had stolen baby Sorcha and left me in her place. Why? Was it because I had been born crookit? Was it because Sorcha was fairer and bonnier than me? Did the faery queen kill the babies she took? Did she eat them?

I did not know.

One day the queen left a thick leather-bound book on a table in her supper room. I had always thought Nan’s book held all the wisdom of the world. Perhaps I could find out something about the faery folk within one of the queen’s hundreds of books. I picked the volume up and turned the pages, but to my disappointment it was in a language I did not know.

‘Do you read, Caitlín?’ Mary asked in surprise, coming into the room. I jumped and dropped the book, then picked it up and smoothed the pages, my cheeks burning.

‘A wee bit, your Grace,’ I answered.