Sword and Song

by Roz Southey

  I refused to help him out. I was pretty certain he was passing his mistress off as his wife and not in any position to lecture on morality.

  “It’s impossible,” he said. “I cannot pay a man to entertain me when he’s betrothed to one of my guests!”

  To do him justice, this was clearly genuine outrage. I said, “You can rest assured that none of your guests need know the true situation. We’ve every intention of keeping the matter secret until after the wedding.”

  Was there any point in placating Alyson any longer, I wondered? The prospect of marrying Esther was becoming more and more inevitable, and in that case, did I really need to concern myself over a mere fifteen guineas? Mere, that is, compared to Esther’s wealth.

  Alyson seemed to be calming down. “You will undertake to guarantee secrecy.”

  I thought I could. I started, “I believe – ” But we were interrupted by a bright gleam that shot across our sight and hovered on the topmost point of a branch of candlesticks. “Mr Demsey?”

  I gestured at Hugh, on the other side of the table. The spirit shot off towards him. “Aurelia Robinson,” she introduced herself, a rather unusual proceeding for a spirit. “Daughter of Sir Matthew Robinson.”

  “Oh yes,” Hugh said, obviously nonplussed.

  “I have a message for you.”

  “Oh?”

  “From Mr Bedwalters, the constable.”

  “Ex-constable,” Heron said.

  “He would be grateful, sir, if you were to go to Dog Bank.”

  “I’ve just come that way,” I said, surprised. Alyson was looking puzzled; I said, “It’s above All Hallows church – a respectable street.”

  “There’s someone asking for you,” the spirit said, single-mindedly concentrating on its message. “A dying man’s last request.”

  “Who?” I demanded. “Who’s dying?”

  The spirit said, “Someone of the lower orders, I understand. A chapman – ”

  22

  Many of the poorer buildings are neglected and are falling to pieces.

  [Letter from Retif de Vincennes, to his brother Georges, 3 June 1736]

  If Bedwalters was startled to see all four of us walking up the street towards him, he did not show it. He got up from his bench and waited calmly for us to reach him. Neatly dressed, ink on his fingertips as ever, thinner than previously, and with a look of peace about him I’d never seen before.

  I was breathing heavily from climbing the hill. Edward Alyson was right to think he would not enjoy accompanying us; Dog Bank was respectable but it was poor, and stank. And this would probably be another of those dull ‘talking’ sessions; Alyson, I’d noticed, preferred occasions when there was running and shouting to be done.

  He made me feel staid and middle-aged.

  Heron and Esther greeted Bedwalters civilly; Bedwalters was polite in return, although Heron had treated him abominably on their last meeting. Hugh was anxious for news. “The chapman. He’s been attacked?”

  Bedwalters nodded. “Hit by a slate as he walked through an alley early this morning.”

  “A slate?” I said, startled. “One that fell from a roof?”

  “Apparently so,” Bedwalters said. I knew him well enough to know that he meant what he said, nothing less, and certainly nothing more. Apparently. “He was carried home but there was nothing to be done for him. The apothecary gave him something to dull the pain, and I was sent for. I did, of course, make it plain that I was no longer constable but they insisted. When I arrived, he was very weak, but I heard him mention your name, sir – ” He glanced at Hugh. “And I understood him to mean he wanted to talk to you.”

  “Right,” Hugh said. “Where is he?”

  I took his arm. “I don’t think there’s any rush, Hugh.” I held Bedwalters’s gaze. “You said there was nothing more to be done.”

  He nodded. “He died a few minutes ago.”

  “Damn,” Hugh said. “Damn, damn, damn...”

  I went into the house, ducking through a door so low I suspected the house must have subsided at some point in the past. A smoky dark room held two or three ancient chairs, an unsteady table and a pot simmering over an open hearth. A ladder at the back of the room led up to what I presumed must be a bedroom, but they’d clearly been unable to get the sick man up there and had laid him instead on a mattress behind the table.

  A woman sat on the floor beside the mattress, dry-eyed and still. She did not look at me, or move. I leant on the unsteady table and lowered myself to one knee beside the mattress.

  The body lay on its back. He’d been a man in his late thirties or early forties, blond hair receding, leaving only a few wisps on his forehead. A weather-beaten man. A spare, lean fit man. The sharp end of the falling slate had laid his face open from temple to mouth, cutting over the bridge of his nose, down the length of his left cheek and ending just below his bottom lip. It was the kind of cut a butcher might make when cleaving meat from the bone. The smashed white skull was visible inside. Blood masked his face and drenched the front of his clothes.

  I peered closer and reached for the wound. The woman, in a sudden convulsion, slapped my hand away. She stared at me with a fierce anger and possessiveness.

  “Well?” Hugh asked.

  I heaved myself to my feet, wincing against the twinge of pain in my side. “I can see traces of slate in the wound,” I said, “flecks of grey.”

  “It must have been an accident, surely?” Hugh said. “A slate is hardly an effective murder weapon. To drop one on someone you’d have to climb up on the roof, push it down on him – he’d hear you and get out of the way, surely. And you’d have to have a damn good aim.”

  I hesitated over whether to give the woman a coin or two. Her fierce pride deterred me. It was the wrong moment. I went back out into the street. Bedwalters was just putting something into a pocket with a dull red flush of embarrassment on his face; Esther had apparently persuaded him to accept a little charity. I gave him a coin of my own and asked him to give it to the widow when the first shock of bereavement had died away. He said he would.

  “Where was the chapman hurt?” I asked.

  “Two or three streets away.”

  We all traipsed off in a procession led by Bedwalters. Heron engaged him in a quiet word or two; Hugh skittered along behind them like a man desperate to get everything done as quickly as possible.

  Esther and I walked behind. It was the first time I’d had private conversation with her since our – betrothal. Good God, but we must talk about that! But instead, I found myself saying: “Why are you not wearing your breeches?”

  She was startled. Her pale hair had been disordered by the exercise, and trailed out from under her riding hat; a fine sheen of perspiration shone on her face. She smiled. “I thought that if I am to be a respectable married woman, then I should behave respectably.”

  “I don’t like it,” I said curtly, and inwardly cursed. I sounded like a man thirty years married already. Esther said nothing. When I looked at her, I saw she was apparently idly regarding her riding gloves which she carried in one hand. Apparently.

  The street in which the chapman had been attacked must be one of the narrowest in town, a mere cranny between houses, leading up from the Key in a series of steps separated by a yard or two of uneven cobbles. It was not a salubrious place. The houses on either side were almost all unoccupied – windows were cracked or broken, some doors had been stoved in. In one or two houses, a pile of rags suggested someone slept there. At the bottom, the street opened on to the Key; I saw a fragment of a boat, a few children running by, a stray pig snuffling at corners. Seagulls screamed overhead; the clear air carried the clattering rush of coal being tipped into a hold.

  And here there was only a dark stain on the cobbles where a man had fallen in his death agonies. Fragments of shattered slate lay all around; pieced together they must have formed a massive whole.

  “One of the biggest slates.” Hugh kicked angrily at one fragment. “Fro
m the bottom edge of the roof. And it’s my fault. I sent him to his death.”

  “It’s the murderer’s fault, no one else’s,” I said. I picked up a small piece of wood, about an inch long. The wooden peg that had once nailed the slate to the rafters. It looked undamaged.

  Esther picked up another nail and handed it to me silently. I couldn’t read her mood; she seemed unconcerned, not upset in the least by my sharpness. Heron was talking to Bedwalters, Hugh kicking about the cobbles. I risked a low “I’m sorry.”

  She looked up at me. “I am not unaware of the difficulties of the situation,” she said. “But there is a natural law, Charles – the more unconventional the situation, the more conventional your behaviour must be.”

  “Damn it,” I said recklessly, “then I’d rather settle for the situation as it was.”

  “You are calling off our betrothal?”

  I felt like pointing out I’d never engaged in it in the first place. But a gentleman cannot call off a betrothal; only the lady can change her mind.

  “Precisely,” Esther said calmly, as if she’d read my mind. “Perhaps we should discuss this at a better time.”

  “I agree,” I said feelingly.

  Bedwalters was telling Heron how the chapman had been found. Despite his horrible injury, he’d managed to stagger to the top of the stair where he’d been found by a neighbour. This was probably a considerable time after the attack which, as far as I could judge, had happened while I was taking refuge in the other world. After the attack on me, therefore. The murderer had failed to catch me and had gone at once to eliminate another threat; he could not risk me talking to the chapman. Which argued that the two men must have come very close as the apprentice ran from Mrs McDonald’s house. Did he know Jas Williams and his customers had seen him too – were they also in danger? I thought not; they’d seen him in the shop, so they could probably label him a thief, but they could not directly connect him with Nell’s murder.

  The bloodstain lay at the top of a small flight of five steps; the chapman could hardly have stepped off the last step before he was hit. And – I sniffed – how odd; I could smell fish.

  I glanced around. In the house nearest to where the chapman had fallen, the door hung on one hinge. Two steps led up into the ground floor room; I paused to let my eyes adjust to the semi-darkness after the brightness of the sunshine outside.

  At the back of the room was a bright brand new skillet gleaming over the remains of a small fire; in the pan was a shiny fish, half-cooked, complete with fins, tail and bright watchful eye.

  “It was a trap,” I said.

  Heron caught on quickest. “If the chapman came this way often, he would know this was an empty house. The smell of cooking, therefore, would make him stop to look in.”

  “The gleam of the new pan would have caught his eye,” Esther said.

  “And he would have presented an excellent target for whoever wanted to drop something on his head,” Heron finished.

  Hugh was already heading for the ancient ladder at the back of the room. “Not this house,” I said. “Anyone on the roof of this house wouldn’t have been able to see the chapman hesitating at the door because of the overhang of the eaves. But from the house opposite, the view would have been perfect.”

  Hugh relieved his feelings by kicking in the door of the house in question. He rushed towards the ramshackle ladder at the back as if he thought the villain might still be up there. The ladder led to a filthy room on the first floor, littered with the debris of casual occupation: rags, a chamberpot with a great section out of it, a pile of newspapers so ancient they were a sodden, rotting mass. Another ladder took us up into the roof-space; Hugh called back, “Be careful! It’s dangerous up here.”

  From the top of the ladder, I saw the apex of the roof above me, and the rafters sagging away from it. Huge chunks of the lime and horsehair mortar that had lined the roof had dropped away; wooden nails and laths had rotted, and the slates had come crashing down on the joists below. The blue August sky was bright through gaping holes in the roof; seagulls wheeled overhead.

  Hugh tottered across the joists to the largest hole in the roof; I followed, and found myself staring down at Bedwalters, Heron and Esther, standing in the doorway of the house opposite.

  Immediately in front of us, the last, largest row of slates still clung to the rafters. One huge slate was missing from the rank.

  “He could hardly have missed,” Hugh said, leaning dangerously out to peer at the alley below. “All he had to do was to yank out the nails, give the slate a gentle push, and nature would do the rest. Down it would go.”

  I nodded. “But he had to get the chapman to stop, so he’d have time to pull out the nails.”

  “It wasn’t an attack in anger or fright,” Hugh said distastefully. “The whole thing was planned. He had to buy the skillet and the fish, light the fire, cook the fish a little to get the smell going – ”

  “He had to know the man would come this way, and when,” I added.

  “I still don’t understand!” Hugh protested passionately. “He doesn’t have to stay in the town. He could simply flee to London. There’s no need for all this killing!”

  “The book,” I said. “That’s what keeps him here, though I don’t have the least idea why.”

  I thought of telling Hugh I’d found the book but something stopped me. It would hardly profit him to know; only I knew how to come and go between that world and our own, so Hugh couldn’t retrieve the book if the need arose. And it was best that he could genuinely claim ignorance if asked about it.

  In the street, the others listened to what we had to report. “It’s an amazing crime,” I said, staring at the bright eye of the fish in the shining new skillet. “So complicated and detailed.”

  “Well planned,” Heron said.

  “But done on impulse.”

  Hugh snorted. “Nonsense!”

  I shook my head. “No one who’d paused to think would have done it this way. Apart from anything else, there’s a huge element of good luck in it. What if the chapman had been so preoccupied he’d not noticed the smell of cooking and walked straight on? What if he’d met a friend and gone round another way? Think how much simpler it would have been simply to walk up behind and stab him.”

  “No,” Bedwalters said. “There would have been a chance that the chapman would look round when he heard footsteps behind him. He might have seen his attacker. Alive or dead afterwards, he would have been able to lay the blame at the right door.”

  “And think of the blood,” Esther said. “The murderer might have been covered with it – hard to explain away or wash out.”

  They had a dozen reasons why the murderer should not have come to close grips with his victim. But I still thought the whole affair very odd.

  “It’s an arrogant crime,” I said. “Carried out by a man who thinks he can get away with anything.”

  “He has,” Hugh said.

  I shook my head. “Not yet.”

  I turned on my heels to survey the alley. A preposterous crime. It was as if the murderer was defying me to catch him. As if he was saying, I can do the most far-fetched things and still you can’t guess who I am.

  It was to be a duel between us, it seemed. Very well, I thought, so be it.

  There would be only one victor.

  23

  Do not be offended if one of the lower orders greets you with familiarity. This is merely the common conceit that any Englishman, no matter how poor, is better than any foreigner.

  [A Frenchman’s guide to England, Retif de Vincennes

  (Paris; published for the author, 1734)]

  Alyson was prowling the parlour of the Golden Fleece; he pounced on us as soon as we walked in.

  “I’ve missed the excitement!” he cried with boyish indignation. “The spirits have been telling me all about it.”

  “Cut to the bone,” declared a male spirit, hidden somewhere among the tankards on the table. “Flesh peeled back
right down his face.”

  “What happened?” Alyson’s face was shockingly eager. I could not forget that a man lay dead, a decent honest man who’d tried to uphold the law, who’d tried to get justice for a girl he’d never met.

  The cold meats and ale still lay on the table. Hugh looked on them with distaste, flung himself moodily into a chair. Esther hesitated, then poured herself wine. I looked at it all and found myself suddenly viciously hungry. I’d not eaten since a very early breakfast and it was now mid-afternoon.

  I let Heron outline what we’d been doing, cut meat and bread and bit deep into them. Esther asked me to carve her a slice of beef.

  “But you must catch the fellow!” Alyson said as Heron finished. “A man like that can’t be allowed to remain free! It’s as Ridley said – he began with the dregs of the town, now he’s progressed to an honest but poor citizen. Soon he’ll attack someone of consequence!”

  I cast a warning glance at Hugh. “I’ll find him,” I said.

  Perhaps I had been too vehement; Alyson looked at me with a frown.

  “Good,” Hugh said. “And I’ll be first in the queue to line the fellow up and shoot him.”

  Heron strolled to the table and helped himself to wine. “Have you organised the horses, Alyson?”

  Alyson was still staring at me. “What? Oh, yes.”

  “Then,” Heron said. “I think we had better eat, then start off for Long End. We should have plenty of time to get back before dark.”

  “How the devil can you eat anything!” Hugh exploded.

  Heron raised an eyebrow at his tone of voice; Esther said, “I suspect we will be back too late for dinner. Wiser to have something now.”

  “Long End?” I said. “We can’t go back to Long End. The murderer’s here.”

  Heron sipped wine and stared me out. “It appears the girl was killed because she knew of the book, and the chapman because he could identify the murderer. You were attacked last night because you found the fellow in his lair and nearly apprehended him. He must believe that if you are capable of finding his hideout, then you can find him. Therefore, you are in danger.” He poured more wine and sat down, lounging at his ease in one of the hard chairs at the table, the very picture of the man in charge. “So we must remove you from the place of danger.”