by Peter Tonkin
‘Ben,’ said Tom quietly, ‘I will address the servants here.You take young James aside and tell him our news man to man. And gently, mind!’
As Ben removed the boy, Tom turned back to the vacant faces. There were no ladies-in-waiting, liveried footmen, secretaries, advisors or factors here. Everyone of standing in the household, from the chief cook to the housekeeper in charge of My Lady’s wardrobe, from the young Baron’s tutor to whichever of them taught him self-defence, were all gone on the road – gone three days since on Monday, as James had said, with the coachmen and the master of horse and all.
Two days since – in the morning, when the dew called up enough mud to spatter off the dry roads on to legs, as Tom himself had observed – Master Mann and John had turned aside to come into London with messages for Tom and Robert Poley – turned aside in apparent expectation of delivering their letters and coming back here tonight at the latest; and someone had turned aside behind them – or had already arranged their reception and disposal. Then, while the messengers had died and the Master of Logic had chopped what few facts were left into a dog’s dinner of misunderstanding, Lady Margaret’s household had continued south and westward. The sun that had set behind Tom’s shoulder tonight must have been shining in the Lady Margaret’s eyes as she waited, desperately, for his reply.
Prompted by this thought, Tom pressed forward with brutal directness. ‘I bring you heavy news,’ he said, stepping forward with no further hesitation. ‘Your chamberlain Master Mann lies dead in London, murdered by unknown hands – as does young John, who has shared his fate. Lady Margaret’s letters – to myself and any others – have miscarried or been destroyed. I believe she stands in some danger or believes herself to do so. I am come here on my way to her side to seek for evidence that might support her fears and to ask amongst you some questions whose answers might start the men who killed your friends and stop the men who wish the Lady Margaret harm.’
‘But first,’ said Talbot Law into the shocked and cavernous silence, ‘as we have ridden all day and stopped for neither food nor drink to get here, we would wish to send three of your number to stable, water and feed our horses while we join you in your supper now; and as we do so, my friend Master Musgrave will reveal to you the details of the case so far.’
***
‘Pease pottage and small beer!’ said Talbot Law some half-hour later. ‘Lenten fare indeed; as thin and unwholesome as the information you gleaned from those bumpkins in the kitchen.’
‘It is Lent, old Law, Good Friday this Friday coming and Easter Day on Sunday. Besides, what else did you expect, with all the finer palates and sharper wits Cotehel-bound?’
‘Aye, but pease pottage and small beer!’
‘And there was more sawdust than flour in that bread,’ added Ben disconsolately. ‘I’m still picking trencher-splinters from my teeth. I note the boy was too wise to eat any of the poisonous mess.’
‘Shocked to fasting, perhaps, by your dreadful news.’
‘Perhaps, but I beg leave to doubt. He raised an eyebrow and said our arrival in their stead and the tones in which we talked of them had made him suspect the truth. It may be so. Or he may have caught Logic, like a contagion, from our sharper city wits.’
‘Hush! He will hear you!’
James, still pale with shock in spite of what Ben had said, his eyes big and bright with tears, appeared in the doorway and called them forward. ‘This is Lady Margaret’s chamber,’ he said. ‘I have lit candles as you required but would beg you to make haste. That is almost our whole supply and it must last us until the household returns.’
‘Or Lady Margaret sends another chamberlain with a well-stocked purse to replace Master Mann,’ said Tom bracingly. ‘No. Stay with us, if you’d be so kind. We have need of your wits and your wisdom here.’
He exchanged a speaking look with Ben, but was immediately proved right. They needed James’s knowledge – if nothing more – at once. The first thing of note within the room was a chimney-breast.
The room itself was remarkable only in that it was so small to house a countess, though of course well over thrice the size of Tom’s own room in Black Friars. The ceiling was low and squared on white plaster with black wood beams. Black wood also was the panelling that reached almost to the ceiling itself black wood relieved only by one portrait, that of the young Baron, hanging out of place and a little lonely to the left of the bed. The floor was wood too, but lovingly polished and blessedly splinter free – more so than the bread from dinner, at any rate. The furnishings were as modest as the chamber: a writing-table that stood breast-high with a cupboard hung above it; a clothes press and a wardrobe; no chairs, but the press’s lid was worn, so the Lady Margaret must sit there sometimes – though, said the desk, never to read or write. There was the bed, and, opposite the bed-foot, the jutting chimney-breast, which, after one comprehensive glance, took all of Tom’s attention.
The fire below it was low and deep-set, as befitted a bedroom hearth; but the breast itself, of broad red brick was strikingly unadorned. In a position such as this there should hang a mirror or...‘A picture,’ said Tom. ‘I see the marks that must have been made by a gilded frame. What was it? Where is it?’
‘The mysterious gift,’ said James. ‘Where it came from nobody seems to know, but it was a portrait of Lady Margaret herself, though she swears she never sat for such a thing. It showed her head and shoulders. She was painted in a fashionable bodice with a high lace ruff. I know nothing of such matters, of course – they are fit neither for my sex or station; but I heard Mistress Danforth talking of it once to Master Quin.’
‘And who are these?’ Tom needed all his concentration to follow the boy’s words as his description brought the wounded portrait so vividly to mind.
‘Mistress Agnes Danforth is Lady Margaret’s housekeeper. She does for the family and their servants as Master Mann does – did – for the castle staff. And Master Quin is her master of horse. He oversees all her movements and transports. For all his mighty ways and his comings and goings he earns his keep but twice in a year: getting them all to Castle Cotehel and back from thence again.’
‘And so, this portrait, that appeared so mysteriously but took My Lady’s fancy and occasioned the comment between Danforth and Quin – how comes it to be absent now? Has Lady Margaret taken it with her for fondness of the thing?’
‘Indeed no. I feel she never liked it much, in fact; but the young Baron took to it and asked that she hang it there. She did so to please him. But the chimney-breast becomes hot in the winter and so the picture was moved. Then, as strangely as it had come, it vanished, and no one any the wiser. Vanished more than a month since.’
‘If the young Baron took a liking to it,’ demanded Ben suddenly, ‘why did he not hang it in his own chamber?’
‘Oh no!’ answered James, genuinely shocked. ‘In the Baron’s chamber hang the portraits of his ancestors in the title. No pictures but of the great men of the house of Outram must ever hang in there.’
‘Models of historic perfection against whom the young man may model himself, no doubt,’ said Tom, his interest in Lady Margaret’s portrait and portraits in general apparently at an end. He looked at the Baron’s portrait and the panelling opposite, frowning. Then he gave a little shrug and apparently forgot that matter too. He had turned to the bed.
Lady Margaret’s bed was a large four-poster. In its size and shape lay nothing unusual, save that it was breathtakingly sumptuous. The brocade with which it was spread matched that which young James wore except in one respect. It seemed to be, in fact, the cloth of gold that his clothing merely mimicked. There was an unusual element to the bed, however, at least to Tom’s eye: the four posts rose at the corners to within an ell of the low beam-squared ceiling – and there they stopped: naked. There were no rails, no hangings to dress them. Every such bed that Tom had seen or heard of was heavily dressed with curtains – not least because bedrooms, even bedrooms richer than this, in castles only ha
lf as ancient, were full of draughts and chills, especially in the darkest hours when the fire had died.
‘It is Lady Margaret’s years of imprisonment in the mad room at Wormwood House, perhaps,’ said Tom quietly, ‘that makes her fearful of tiny spaces – even within the hangings of a bed.’
‘That may be the reason,’ said James, seemingly much struck with the thought. ‘Certainly she has never allowed the bed to be canopied while she occupies it. Not that I have any intimate knowledge of her wishes and directions, you understand. But I have listened; and I have observed.’
‘Listened, indeed, to Mistress Danforth talking to Master Quin,’ said Tom gently, ‘and observed how things are done under those worthies and under Master Mann. And no more than that? Have you ever served in any establishment other than this one?’
‘No, sir. John and I were born on the estate. Our mother and father were servants here before us. Indeed, they were sufficiently well thought of to accompany the old family to Wormwood House the year they all fell victim to the dreadful visitation. They went up with Master Seyton, who was the chamberlain in those days. They all went up and left us here with Master Mann, who was his assistant, or deputy so to speak. Then the Plague came and they never came back. I myself have never been anywhere else – except for Wormwood House and Highmeet House in London, of course. Shut up though they are, they need visiting and tending once in a while. Master Mann would take John and me up there with him on occasion – training us up, he’d call it; and I was down at Castle Cotehel once, some years since, before the old family died. But I was no more than a lad then.’
‘So, for a Kentish lad tied to a country estate and yet to get much experience in the matter of growing a beard, you’ve seen a good bit of the world.’ As Tom talked, so he opened and closed the doors to the little book case above the desk. Then he opened the desk itself.
‘Ah, at last. A paper. Writing. Writing scored over and corrected. What is this? Reigate scored through and replaced with Croydon. Croydon is in Lady Margaret’s hand, I assume. I do not know the other. What is this?’
‘It is the route of the journey, sir. And you are mistaken: the two hands are Master Quin’s with Master Gawdy the Secretary’s written over it, at Lady Margaret’s direction I am sure.
‘In past times, the family has made its progress over some seven to ten days, sleeping over at the places marked; but Lady Margaret is not for slow travel: the longer on the road, she believes – so I have heard – the greater the danger.’
‘So if we follow the Lady’s directions, if not her hand, we follow her footsteps, so to speak – her planned route south at least; to Croydon by Monday sunset, whence she must have despatched her messengers yesterday morning, while she set out for Farnham. She sleeps at Winchester tonight and then Salisbury, Sherborne, Honiton and Buckfast. An abbey town for Good Friday and another for Easter Day. She is moved by the spirit as well as by the will. Is this the way you went south to Cotehel yourself?’
‘I can hardly remember, sir...I remember the celebrations when we arrived, though. On the first of April we celebrate our own Feast of Fools down there – from time immemorial, as though it was January, in truth.’
‘That’s as may be,’ said Tom, folding the paper into his purse and exchanging a meaningful look with his associates over the voluble boy’s head. ‘But you have spent the most of your time here – listening and observing, as you say. Now have you ever heard tell or seen sign of secret passages and priests’ holes within these ancient walls?’
The question was so unexpected, and had been so carefully disguised as an ambuscado with Tom’s apparently irrelevant chatter and the newly discovered list of Lady Margaret’s destinations, that it caught them all off guard.
Young James’s eyes glinted a little in the candles’ brightness as they moved. Then he turned his head to disguise the tell-tale; then turned it back again, his gaze level and expression open. ‘Yes indeed. I can scarcely believe you reasoned it without Satanic help, as you knew my name to be James amongst all the thousands it might have been...but yes. I have been told of just such a panel. It is supposed to be somewhere over here. On the inner wall, I believe.’ He crossed to the wall on the right side of the bed and began to tap the black-wood panels there.
Nine: The Thirteenth Mouse
‘Do you know what a sin-worm is?’ asked Tom as they tapped the solid-seeming panelling where young James had indicated. ‘Is the name familiar to you?’
‘No,’ said James, frowning. Ben and Talbot kept their stony faces and tapped at Tom’s direction, listening for a hollow sound. One knew well enough, thought Tom; and the other would never willingly admit to ignorance.
‘It is a man who loves to watch women. In secret – when they do not suspect he watches – that he may see them doing things they would never do in public.’ As he spoke, Tom eased his weight against the panel he was working on to see if it would give. Those built hard against the stone of a wall would sit firm. One backed by the tunnel James suspected would be likely to give way a little; but which one that might be was any man’s guess. There must be more than fifty panels in the room, each square and edged with intricate designs of cats and mice, nutmegs and peppercorns, from the arms of the House of Outremer – the spices on which the family’s fortunes had been made and on which they still so firmly rested; spices brought from all over the world in ships; ships famously well stocked with cats to keep at bay the mice and rats that could do such terrible damage to such delicate and priceless cargo; argosies of ships heaving in and out of the Channel under the frowning guard of Cotehel Castle, and home to safe haven in Plymouth.
‘So a sin-worm is like the man called Tom in the old tale of Lady Godiva,’ said James with a frown of effort as he strove to understand – or to hear a hollow sound under his wall-pressed ear. ‘Tom who peeped and lost his eyes.’
‘Indeed,’ said Tom, at sudden pains not to think of Lady Margaret as Lady Godiva, particularly as he had seen her in the Lady’s famous state. That would be calling himself a peeping Tom indeed.
Once they found a likely panel he would have to seek a catch, he thought to distract himself at once. Lady Margaret would not take kindly to axe-work in her bedchamber, he suspected.
‘Like Actaeon the hunter in the Greek legends, who saw the goddess Diana bathing in the forest and was turned to a stag then hunted in punishment,’ added Ben, as he studied the wall from further back, looking with an apprentice bricklayer’s eye, though no one had told him to.
‘Indeed,’ said Tom. ‘But Actaeon as hunter, not hunted – Actaeon seeking the goddess out and watching her disrobe and bathe naked, all for his private pleasure.’
‘Such men can be very dangerous indeed,’ observed Talbot, ‘particularly when they wish to change observation into action. To touch what they have been content to watch.’
‘A chilling prospect,’ agreed Ben, pretending more wisdom than he possessed. ‘Even Ovid overlooked such sinfulness. There are no sin-worms in his Metamorphoses. A little to your right, master. No, another panel down. Yes. The wall above looks...’ He fell silent, noting the frown with which young James was looking at him.
‘If the man we met in London, whose actions there began this whole adventure, is the sin-worm, then he is preparing to take action indeed,’ said Tom. ‘But we must ask why? Why now? What has changed in his thoughts to prompt such a change in his actions?’ As he spoke, so he followed the apprentice’s directions and moved down until he was below a slight flaw in the white-painted stonework – a flaw so slight, indeed, that only the bricklayer’s eyes would have noticed its existence or its implication. ‘Why else would he have done all the things that he has done?’
‘Even the lightest suspicion that takes you along such a dangerous route must make you fly to the Lady’s side,’ agreed Talbot Law heavily. He had stood back with James now, letting Ben’s experienced eye guide Tom’s wise fingers.
‘It does, old Law, it does. But I will not go to her all ignora
nce, if I can help it. I will go armoured with knowledge and armed with sharp suspicion. Which is the point of our exploration here. Ah. Well done, Ben. I have it.’ He knocked on the panel as he had knocked on Elfinstone’s door and it rang with equal hollowness.
‘Ben? Can your wise eyes see some flaw in design or strangeness in ornament that might conceal a catch of some sort? – other than the nail above, which I assume once held the mysterious and missing portrait when it was moved from the chimney-breast, for it is opposite the boy’s on the outer wall. Here, too, I see traces of gilding from the frame. And Master James, have we reached the limit of your knowledge in the matter of this panel?’
Ben spoke before the boy could, alerted earlier in Tom’s meandering soliloquy. ‘There are twelve mice at the bottom but thirteen at the top. If you were to press the last of them...’
‘Ah,’ said Tom with deep satisfaction as his fingers, obedient to Ben’s suggestion, caused the thirteenth mouse to move and the whole black panel four feet square to spring open and back.
Tom pushed it gently and it opened absolutely, flat back against a tunnel wall. Behind the panel in the wainscot was a tiny passageway four feet high and four or so wide, carved straight into the seemingly massive stonework of the wall. From the centre of its rough lintel, half-hidden by the width of the decorated edging, rose a crack that, four feet higher still, became the flaw in the wall that Ben had noticed. Tom was the first to stoop and enter it. Armed with a candle caught up from the nearest sconce, he stepped over the little ledge of wainscot edging that rose four inches from the bedroom floor then plunged a good foot down to the cold stone beyond. As soon as he did so, it became clear that the little tunnel had never been meant to contain more than one man alone. Even the open door itself seemed to crowd dangerously against his shoulder, like a braggart set on a brawl. In spite of the fact that there was a good step down from the modern, raised, wooden floor of the bedchamber on to the earlier stone flooring of the tunnel itself, it was cramped and tiny.