by Robin Blake
* * *
I reached the Gamecock Inn ten minutes before two. It was almost deserted. News that a man had sickened on Wednesday after eating his dinner and died on Thursday, meant few would relish dining there on Friday. While every other alehouse and inn was at bursting point, the only customers in Mrs Fitzpatrick’s dining room were a pair of newly arrived strangers and the stone-deaf tobacconist of Stoney Gate, Nat Parrott, eating with his neighbouring trader, Michael Drake, whom I had met at Lacey’s the previous day.
I found the widow Fitzpatrick standing with Luke Fidelis, bemoaning her loss of trade. She greeted me volubly.
‘Oh, Mr Cragg, how very good of you to patronize us once again! Is the Gamecock to be ruined by this staying away? All the prime meat I’ve bought in for the week will be ruined. We may salt some of it, but when, I should like to know, will I get my investment back? I’ve dug deep to pay for it all, extra beef, extra beer, preserved fruits and I don’t know what.’
I told her I thought the customers would soon come back once they believed any danger had passed.
‘But when will that be, Doctor?’ she wailed, turning back to my friend. ‘Another week and the election will be done and the people gone from town like the starlings in winter.’
‘There is no knowing, Mrs Fitz,’ he said, ‘but I agree with Mr Cragg. I would be surprised if this sad death is not quickly superseded by other sensations.’
We took our seats at a private table and studied the bill of fare. Fidelis said he would have a cheese tart, cold roast teal and boiled salad.
‘I shall order hotpot,’ I said.
‘Good God, man, that is a gamble,’ he whispered. ‘Isn’t your name on Destercore’s list? I could not promise to save you if you happen to ingest what Allcroft did.’
‘Oh, I’m not ordering it to eat,’ I said.
Mrs Fitzpatrick herself brought us wine and took our order for food. I asked for ham, cheese, pickled onions with mushroom ketchup, in addition to the bowl of hotpot which, I was reassured, was prepared exactly to the usual recipe. While we waited I enquired after the progress of Miss Plumb.
‘She is completely better today.’
‘And is she still angelic?’
Fidelis looked pained.
‘Yes,’ he said stiffly. ‘That is the essential point about angels, Titus. They do not change.’
‘One called Lucifer did, as I remember.’
To which he had no answer.
The food came and we set about our meat and cheese while the dish of hotpot cooled on the table between us.
‘Have you had the opportunity to examine the remains of Allcroft’s meal?’ I asked.
He nodded.
‘Yes – mutton, kidneys, peas, carrots, onion, cereals. I asked Mrs Lorris, who considered them the usual ingredients.’
‘Cereals, you said? What kind?’
‘Oatmeal and barley. Tell me where this is leading.’
‘To our examination of this plate before us. I want to make a comparison, for I learned something suggestive yesterday.’
Fidelis leaned towards the plate, his face alert. I picked up a spoon and stirred it around in the hotpot, lifting out ingredients as the spoon encountered them. The presence of carrots was easily confirmed; then flesh, kidney, onions, peas each in turn revealed themselves.
‘We have found the meat and vegetables,’ I prompted. ‘But what cereals do we have?’
‘Oatmeal is all that I can see.’
‘Good!’ I cried, with (I admit) an unseemly show of triumph. ‘This is coming out exactly as I hoped. The usual cereal used in hotpot is indeed oatmeal, as Elizabeth confirmed for me this morning. Barley is only sometimes used, for it is dearer. Here at the Gamecock, it seems, they content themselves with the conventional use of oatmeal only.’
Fidelis looked bewildered.
‘But not in Allcroft’s dinner, Titus. It contained barley, I swear it did.’
‘Of course it did, Luke, and I think we shall find that is what killed him.’
Fidelis had been in the act of raising his glass to his lips. He put it down instead.
‘How is that?’
I took him through my conversation on the previous day with Isaac Satterthwaite, stressing that, when working around the brewery, the rat catcher invariably mixed his arsenic with softened barley taken from the brewer’s store. As Luke listened, a smile stole over his face.
‘I understand you, Titus,’ he said when I had finished, seizing the spoon from my hand and plunging it into the hotpot. He lifted it out heavily loaded with meat. ‘And it’s clever. It confirms my opinion that John Allcroft was murdered, even if we cannot yet say who did it.’
He shovelled the meat into his mouth.
‘I have an idea on that score also,’ I said, as I watched his jaws working.
Fidelis made a beckoning motion with his fingers.
‘Tell,’ he mumbled.
I described how I had seen the servant Peters in the hallway of the inn.
‘He is staying on the spot, which means he might readily have been on the premises when Allcroft died.’
Fidelis, who had swallowed at last, was animated by this news of Peters.
‘This is progress, Titus.’ He tapped his chest at the place where the last of his mouthful was still descending his gullet. ‘Excellent hotpot.’
‘Well, suspicion must fall on Peters,’ I went on. ‘He could have seduced or corrupted Maggie and made her get the poisoned barley.’
‘She may even have taken the plate of food to Peters’s room, waited while he mixed in the poison, and afterwards taken it to poor Allcroft’s as if nothing had happened. It could have been done in a minute.’
‘And don’t forget, Luke, this is the second death to have occurred near him. Peters was on his way to the Ferry Inn when Antony Egan went into the river. Both men were on his master’s list of political enemies.’
‘In other words this may all have been done by the manipulations of Destercore, in which case Peters is only the marionette.’
‘But why? How could it help Destercore’s party to kill one or two of the other side’s voters?’
‘Fear, Titus. Most of those coming into town will be Tories, won’t they? Country people. If they fear for their lives they will not stay to vote, they’ll hop straight back to their burrows like rabbits out of the rain. The Tory vote could be decimated.’
I considered.
‘That’s plausible. But we’ve had two deaths and there’s been no flight to the countryside yet.’
‘There is still time. Antony Egan’s death may not have been part of the plot, but the poisoning of Allcroft was meant to look like a contagion, as you yourself thought it was when you first saw him. Another case or two like this and talk of plague will empty the town faster than a snake can spit.’
We drained our glasses and asked for the bill. When she’d brought it Mrs Fitzpatrick noticed the hardly eaten hotpot. She leaned across the table and sniffed it.
‘There’s nothing wrong with that!’ she announced, straightening her back and challenging me with a proud look.
‘Oh no, absolutely nothing, Mrs Fitzpatrick,’ I agreed. ‘It is perfectly delicious.’
‘Then I wish you would tell folk, because this hotpot has got a bad reputation for itself, and all through no fault of its own. Clear its name for it – will you do that for me, Mr Cragg?’
I said I would do my best.
‘Well, I have taken on many cases in my years as an attorney,’ I told Fidelis, after she had bustled away, ‘but this was the first time I’ve taken a brief from a dish of food.’
Fidelis laughed.
‘And the first time you might boast that you’ve seen your client eaten, Titus.’
Chapter Eleven
THE MAY DAY festivities were still under way as we walked out into the sunshine of Stoney Gate. With the swollen population of the town, most of them already intent on drinking and feasting, the holiday had quickly reached
an intensity I had never seen before. From various points of the compass wild cheers and raucous singing reached us on the breeze from Market Place.
We parted at the top of Cheapside and, going home, I found Elizabeth waiting. She had seen the maypole dance and was now bonneted and ready to walk out with me to see the procession.
‘Destercore is a villain, I am sure of it,’ I told her, unable to rid my mind of dark suspicious thoughts. ‘He has come here to murder voters with poison, and make it look like plague, and so frighten people out of town. I think I must take this to Mayor Biggs.’
‘Can you prove it?’
‘No.’
‘Then do not speak to the mayor, Titus. Not yet. The man’s fool enough as it is. There’s no knowing what extremes he may go to if he thinks his party is under attack.’
As we came out of the house a group of men were hurrying towards Fisher Gate, calling to each other about some exciting event happening further down the street – an altercation between two gentlemen, which was evidently worth running to see. Curiosity quickened our own steps as we followed.
Outside Porter’s there was a ruck of people. I noticed Luke Fidelis standing on the fringe of the crowd and we went over and stood beside him. Even by rising on my toes I could not see what was happening, but Fidelis is taller.
‘Dr Fidelis,’ said Elizabeth, pulling at his sleeve, ‘can you see what the matter is?’
‘It is Sir Harry Hoghton and Francis Reynolds, squaring up to each other.’
‘What, the two candidates? Don’t tell me they are fighting!’
‘Any moment now.’
I pushed forward between two broad-backed spectators until I could get a view. The two Whigs confronted one another like a pair of fighting cocks. Sir Henry was even redder in the face than usual as he stood there, bullish and obstinate; Reynolds was screeching with rage.
I could not catch all the words being spoken, but the injured party appeared to be Reynolds. He was rocking back and forth as a string of reproaches poured from his mouth. These he punctuated at intervals by reaching out and sharply pushing Sir Henry on the breast. His voice rose to a height of indignation and I heard him clearly for the first time.
‘You double-dealing swine! You rogue! You villain!’
Sir Henry was neither backing down, nor retreating, nor in any way showing weakness. He talked back with what might, from the grim smile on his face, have been some choice satirical remarks aimed at Reynolds’s personal qualities. So he stood his ground, with his dander up and his fists clenched, happy to argue if Reynolds was arguing, and ready to box, if it came to boxing.
The crowd was murmuring in rapt anticipation of the fight, when Denis Destercore came bustling out of the Mitre, with the look of a farmer whose milk cows have escaped from their pasture. He was not a big man but he pushed through the crowd like a strong one, until he had placed himself between the two antagonists, parted them and spoken fast and earnestly. The import of what he was saying was clear, even if the words were not: the last thing that the Whig cause needed was a falling-out between the two candidates.
I tapped the shoulder of a big man in front of me, an out-of-towner whom I did not know.
‘Have you seen this from the beginning? What has happened? How is Mr Reynolds injured?’
‘Didn’t you hear?’ the man answered with a coarse laugh. ‘He’s caught the old one planting cabbage on his patch. But the old one thinks it was his patch in the first place.’
I slipped back to Elizabeth and Fidelis.
‘That fellow says Hoghton’s been planting cabbage on Reynolds’s patch,’ I reported.
Luke laughed in delight.
‘What a kitchen garden is this life!”
Then, through the screen of bodies, we saw an arm swing, and heard a cry and a curse, and at once the spectators were parting, making a path for Reynolds. Hoghton, comforted by the agent’s arm around his shoulder, was holding a handkerchief spotted with blood to his nose, while Reynolds continued to breast his way through the spectators, his face a rigid mask of anger. As soon as he was free of us, he crossed the street and let himself into a house on the other side, violently slamming the door behind him. Just before the crash of the door I looked upwards at the windows overlooking the scene. There, standing at a top floor, I saw the figure of Mrs Lavinia Bryce peeping out from behind a half-drawn curtain. As she heard the door hurled against its frame she abruptly turned away, letting the curtain fall.
Elizabeth had laughed so hard she needed to straighten her bonnet.
‘Did you know about this?’ I asked.
‘Oh, no! Not until this minute. Everyone knew about Mr Reynolds, of course, and his – how shall I put it? – his arrangement with Mrs Bryce. But it appears that Sir Harry was there before him and last night tried to reassert himself. Oh, what cock-fighting! What sport!’
I laughed with her. The effect this might have on the election I could not say, but no one could deny that it was as good as a comedy.
We made our way back by a roundabout route to Market Place where we found benches and tables had been set out in front of the White Bull. They were crammed with customers spooning up glasses of custard and supping mugs of ale while a succession of itinerant personalities entertained them. The latest was the Irishman I had seen performing card tricks the previous Monday morning – the prestidigitator of eccentric appearance. He was standing on a wooden chest and giving out a stream of speech to the crowd; Elizabeth and I stopped to hear his patter.
‘It was a grave thing, what happened,’ he was saying, ‘a very grave thing indeed. The poor man died, as I hear, from eating a hotpot. A very gravy thing, that was.’
The audience roared with laughter, leaning into each other and slapping their knees.
‘You laugh, my masters,’ said the man. His raised finger and darkened tone of voice quieted them instantly. ‘You would not, if you happened to have eaten that hotpot yourself. For you would be in the grave also. To eat such a friendly thing as a Lancashire hotpot and to die from it! How horrible. But do not despair.’
His hand whisked in the air then dived into one of his waistcoat pockets, producing a small bottle.
‘This is, my masters and mistresses, is my very own Patent Paracelsian Preservative. It is made from a unique secret formula divulged to me by a German gentleman in Württemberg who had it directly from the lips of a descendent of the great and potent wizard Paracelsus.’
The crowd gasped as he shook the bottle vigorously.
‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘from Paracelsus himself, who could turn lead into gold and do diverse wondrous things, all of whose secrets were entombed with him. But not quite all. One particular secret was not entombed, because I have it here, yes, here, in this bottle, which I can sell to you, any of you, at the extreme modest price of sixpence, yes, sixpence, just sixpence, sirs and madams. This here is the Quintessence of Quintessence, as the good doctor himself called it – a universal specific, a guaranteed guard against contagion, poison, snakebite and the bloody flux.’
Swaying now, and bending at the waist in an inviting way, he turned until he was looking behind him.
‘Dickon!’ he called, snapping his fingers, ‘come here to me.’
A forlorn-looking, cross-eyed man with thin, tangled hair and the appearance of having swallowed his own chin, shuffled out of the crowd that hedged them round. The mountebank stepped from his box, stood Dickon there in his place and produced a spoon from another of his waistcoat pockets. He pulled the cork from the bottle with his teeth and poured a dose of the preservative into the spoon. Still using his teeth he returned the cork to the bottle.
‘This here is Dickon, my particular young pal,’ he said. ‘I have been worried about Dickon this last twenty-four hours, that is to say, it was his health worried me. Why? Because isn’t he after partaking of that hotpot, that selfsame hotpot that did for the unfortunate deceased already mentioned? And did Dickon not guzzle the fatal stew at the very same time, and at t
he very same place, to whit the Gamecock Inn in this town, as the unfortunate deceased had done? He did, my ladies and gentlemen. Indeed he did.’
The crowd groaned. Every eye was fixed on the human exhibit standing before them. With his loose knees and drooping head, he looked as if he might fall dead on the spot at any moment.
‘But fear not, my valiant, and be of cheer,’ the speaker went on, now addressing Dickon directly. ‘For with the irreplaceable assistance of my Patent Preservative you shall be reprieved from what will otherwise be a certain and agonizing death.’
He turned back to the crowd, leaning forward, swaying, and looking confidingly from eye to eye. ‘I have been dosing him every hour, every hour most regularly, since he told me the unwise thing he had done. Now it is time for the next ministration.’
He returned the bottle to his pocket and, reaching up with his free hand, tweaked Dickon’s nose, pulling it upwards so that his mouth fell open. Neatly, he popped the spoonful of medicine into the mouth, released the nose and waited while the patient swallowed.
It was as if a sunbeam had reflected off Dickon’s face and body. He lifted his head, and straightened his legs and his sagging back. A spark lit his eye, and he smiled.
‘There, do you see?’ crowed the mountebank, standing back and spreading his arms to display his handiwork. ‘What could be easier and better? If it works for poor Dickon it will work for you. Now, who will buy? Sixpence a bottle is all I ask. Sixpence, only sixpence. Who will buy?’
He helped Dickon down from the box and motioned him to open it up, revealing a supply of bottles identical to the one in his pocket. In no time people were standing in line and, over the next five minutes, the Irishman did a brisk trade. The fellow had an extraordinary gift for the opportune, but his histrionics also provoked in me a brief meditation on the power of rumour and anxiety. It was that very power that (by Fidelis’s reckoning) someone was trying to use to sway the country electors into fleeing the town for fear of a fictitious plague, a non-existent contagion.