by C. S. Quinn
‘Why do you want to know?’ the constable’s posture tightened in his chair.
‘She is only curious,’ said Charlie, grabbing Maria by the waist and steering her away. ‘What are you doing?’ he hissed in her ear. ‘We are here by grace and favour and you make us sound as though we have come to town to devil worship!’
‘There is no harm in asking,’ said Maria, turning uncertainly back to the men. They glowered after her. The constable leaned to mutter something in the ear of his closest companion.
‘They think we are husband and wife,’ she added, laughing and looking out into the wider tavern. ‘It would not be so terrible if we were would it Charlie?’
She must be drunker than he’d realised, Charlie decided.
‘You told me not so long ago that I was the last man you would ever consider for such things.’
Maria laughed. ‘Oh come now Charlie. Do not bear grudges for past harms. Women do not mean everything they say out loud. I mean to marry for security, it is not a slight on you.’
She said it with a finality which annoyed him. Charlie frowned, momentarily forgetting about the three men still staring out at them from their corner.
‘That is the talk of old widows, not girls of twenty.’
‘What do you think Charlie? That I should marry for love? That is the way for a life of poverty.’
He looked at her for a moment.
‘I do not think you believe that,’ he said. ‘I think you have taken some hard luck and you hope it has made you hard. But it is a poor act.’
A flicker of pain passed over her face. ‘You may think yourself a fine judge of character Charlie Thief-Taker. But you know nothing of me.’ The words caught in her throat. ‘I am to find out some other company.’
She made to move back to where Bitey was sitting, but in a sudden surge of feeling, Charlie grabbed her by the wrist.
‘I know that you cannot look me in the eye when you talk about your future husband,’ he said. ‘I know you pull at the seams of your dress when you speak of having children. And I know the minute you have a drink inside you, you talk of your poor husband-to-be with nothing but scorn.’
She looked for a moment as though she might hit him. Then she wrenched her arm from his grip and stalked off to sit back with Bitey.
The three seated men looked on with interest.
A loud bang echoed through the tavern, and Charlie turned his head to see the plank entry had opened. Heaving his way through was the tavern landlord.
Bitey moved to help him in, and Charlie felt a wave of relief. The tension between them and the locals had been palpable. Now they could find the information they needed and get back to tracking Malvern. Before tonight’s moon brought about some unstoppable completion to his plan.
‘Do you know anything of a wagon that has newly arrived in town?’ asked Bitey, as the landlord leaned on his arm and stood upright in the tavern.
But the landlord’s face was twisted in distress.
‘I know only one thing,’ he said, his voice cracking as he spoke. ‘My daughter. My beautiful daughter has gone missing.’
The landlord turned to the buck-toothed constable.
‘You love my Lilieth do you not?’
The constable nodded, dumbstruck.
‘Then you must help me find her.’
The constable was already rising to his feet. He cast a final malevolent glare towards Charlie and Maria.
‘My great fear is that she has taken plague and gone off to die alone,’ said the landlord, his eyes haunted with the notion. ‘I should hate to think of her in agony in some lonely place.’
The constable extended a sympathetic pat on his arm. ‘Your Lilieth keeps herself in good health,’ he assured him. ‘Likely she has met with some travelling customer, or takes a drink with one of the other girls.’
The landlord shook his head. ‘Her green bonnet was found on the street,’ he said. ‘That is what puts me in the most fear. For she loved that bonnet and would not lose it.’
‘We will go to where she worked,’ said the constable. ‘We might find something out there.’
And the landlord and constable slipped back out of the tavern, leaving Charlie, Maria and Bitey alone with the last two men.
They looked at one another uneasily.
Maria sat down heavily.
‘It is hopeless,’ she said. ‘That was the only person who might have helped us. And he knows nothing.’
Bitey shrugged at the sad reality of this.
But Charlie’s face was lined in thought.
The smell of tobacco sat heavy on the air.
Strange that so many of the town can afford tobacco.
His thoughts moved to the cut-price Burgundy wine which Maria had been drinking.
It must be a smuggler’s town, he realised, thinking back to Marc-Anthony’s imports. Tobacco and wine were all popular illegal imports.
Suddenly the facts slotted together.
The full moon. The docks.
Nothing can get out of those docks. But what about getting something in? That is why Malvern travels by the lunar calendar. It is not for reasons of witchcraft. He comes to town when the tide is high.
Slowly Charlie rose to his feet. His heart was racing.
So Malvern must be smuggling something, he thought. Something that could aid an uprising.
He turned to Maria. ‘We need to get to the docks,’ he said.
Chapter Fifty-Six
When the constable and landlord arrived outside Lilieth’s working room there was a terrible stench of acrid smoke on the air.
They exchanged glances.
‘I will go alone,’ said the constable. ‘If there is fire it could be dangerous.’
He had asked Lilieth to marry him several times and so far she had refused. But he always felt confident she would yield in the end. The constable crossed himself, assessing the haze of smoke in the air. He refused to believe anything bad had happened to her.
‘It smells like someone left a spit of meat to char,’ murmured the landlord.
The constable nodded.
‘Likely she has fallen asleep and left some meat to burn.’ But he couldn’t keep the doubt from his voice.
‘Wait here,’ he added. ‘I will shout down from the window if anything is needed inside. It may be faster to have a man on the street and one inside if something has . . . has happened.’
The constable pushed open the thick wooden door which led to three single rooms. On the ground level nothing seemed awry. But smoke was pouring from the second storey.
The constable pulled off his flammable shirt and jerkin.
He made his way up the creaking stairs to find the smoke was clearing. Whatever the fire was must have gone out. Likely it was as they presumed, a joint of meat which had been charred to a cinder and sent out smoke. A terrible waste in plague times. But better than a house fire.
He entered the single room of the second floor, a plainly decorated chamber which he’d seen many times before.
A single chair sat in the middle of the room.
The constable missed his footing and stumbled.
Sat on the chair, with her green dress burned to cinders, drooped the charred husk of a woman.
The fire had been started in her lap, and the remains of her head had slumped forward.
Thick lines of greasy soot ran over the holes where her ears had been. Her nose had melted to two jagged dark caves and the lips were scorched to nothing, setting the mouth in an endless silent scream.
The constable felt ice tunnelling through every vein in his body.
He staggered again, and then he fell to his knees. ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘Oh God.’ Someone had ripped his heart out and in the empty space thick anguish took hold.
The constable moved towards the corpse like a sleepwalker, willing himself to be wrong. But there was no mistaking her.
Red welts shone on the scalp where her dark hair had been. The large blue eyes that he re
membered had boiled in their sockets with the long lashes burned to a crust.
He thought for a moment that strange heaving sounds came from the chair where she sat. Then he realised it was the noise of his own wracking sobs which were shaking him bodily.
The constable was close enough to smell the acrid fumes which still came from the body, and he reached out and touched the charred shoulder.
In the tumult of his mind he thought for the villain who might have done this.
Wrapped around the body were ribbons. White ribbons. But all bloodied and not burned. Some words had been written on the floor in blood, but he could not read them.
A spell, he realised. Some unholy spell had been cast.
Then he remembered the two strangers from the Coach and Horses.
The harlot girl with her hair uncovered and the man she had come with. She had been interested in spells and witches. And he had stopped her asking, as though they had something to hide.
In the madness of his grief the constable felt both fists grip themselves. He would find out this pair, and he would see them stand trial.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
As the docks came into full view Charlie froze. Behind him he heard Maria suppress a little gasp.
The docks they had seen in the daytime were empty. All abandoned.
Now the thick stretch of water was covered in row-boats. There were over ten of them, their storm lanterns scattered in the dark like winking yellow eyes.
On the waterfront heavyset men were hauling loads from the boats into a single enormous wagon.
They had guessed right. Somebody was importing here. It must be Malvern.
‘He brings in bodies?’ whispered Maria, staring at the cargo. Charlie nodded. The cargo looked to be corpses, wrapped tightly in linen winding sheets.
‘We must get out of sight,’ he muttered. Charlie cast about for a hiding place and settled on an abandoned skiff by the side of the harbour.
‘Behind here,’ he said, pulling her by the arm.
Maria followed and they were quickly out of view.
Through the sails of the skiff Charlie let his eyes run over the operation.
The men doing the loading were a thick-skinned, tough-looking crew, and Charlie identified them immediately as professional smugglers. Most had the kinds of injuries which resulted from a lifetime’s fighting on the high seas away from any hope of medical treatment.
Limbs had been replaced with everything from spade handles to broken oars. Many had the open ulcers of scurvy.
Charlie’s heart was beating so hard he wondered that they couldn’t hear him. Smugglers were the kind of men who drowned each other for sport.
He took in the shape of the row-boats, trying to gain a clue as to where they might be from. Tax evaders shipped whisky from Scotland and wool from Yorkshire as well as luxuries like lace, wine and sugar from all over the globe. Trafficking routes were well established to every country in the colony and pirates would import anything for the right price.
‘Malvern!’ a rough sailor’s voice shouted up the docks.
Charlie stared in disbelief. Walking in amongst the men was a monster. There was no other word for it. The huge shape was swathed in thick canvas, with a long beak jutting down.
As it strode the docks a shaft of moonlight made a ghostly pattern on the head and, rather than revealing some gruesome spectre, Charlie saw it to be a man in a plague-doctor costume.
Malvern. So this was him. The man who had murdered Maria’s sister, fitted out in his killer’s disguise.
The size of him gave the shape an extra bestial quality. He was enormous – easily as large as three of his burly smugglers – and the effect of the huge figure beneath the thick canvas was grotesque. Its crystal eyes winked in the moonlight making it impossible to tell in which direction the figure was staring but giving the impression it could see everywhere.
‘We have to leave,’ Charlie whispered to Maria. ‘These men will kill us if they see us. And we have seen all we might.’
Maria nodded, her face ghostly pale in the moonlight. Slowly they crept back from the skiff and slipped quickly into the streets which ran behind the harbour.
‘We should go to where Bitey stays and hide there,’ said Charlie. ‘Then we might put together some kind of plan to see Malvern captured.’
They were already on the street where Bitey had made his abode.
Charlie felt a sudden pain and his hand went to his collarbone.
A line of blood ran down it. Someone had thrown a stone or a missile.
He looked about in confusion and too late saw Bitey signalling from the second storey stable-block.
Then the road crowded in with men bearing torches and pistols.
‘Remember me?’ asked the buck-toothed man. Beside him the other constables moved closer.
Charlie felt Maria stiffen.
‘You are accused of being witches,’ said the constable. ‘And for the murder of an innocent girl. So we are here to take you to the prison so you might stand trial.’
‘We have done nothing wrong,’ said Charlie evenly, looking at the constable. ‘You waste time imprisoning us. For the real murderer goes free.’
The constable pointed the pistol.
‘We will discover if you are innocent or no soon enough,’ he said. ‘Country trials are not the same as those in the City. They are a great deal faster.’
‘But how will you assemble a judge in plague times?’ asked Maria in confusion.
‘Our judge lives in Wapping prison,’ said the constable, with an evil grin. ‘In this town we believe in the old ways of trialling suspects.’
The men crowded in on them, and Charlie realised what the constable meant.
In London justice was of a more modern kind. But before judges and courts, innocence had been determined by ordeal. Convicts were tied up and dropped into rivers, had fatal wounds administered, or were made to drink lethal poison.
If the suspect lived then it was deemed that God had intervened and shown their innocence. But no one ever survived the trials.
‘We will take you to Wapping prison,’ said the constable, ‘and there you will both meet your trial by Ordeal.’
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Charlie struggled as men grabbed his arms. He heard Maria shrieking in protest of her innocence.
Then they were dragged forward by their bound wrists, towards the part of town which held Wapping prison.
‘We are innocent!’ insisted Maria.
‘We will find that out soon enough,’ said the constable. ‘A poor girl has burned and you will both meet the same fate.’
Charlie assessed their surroundings and the number of captors. Now was not the time to try for escape, he decided. The men held loaded pistols, and he guessed they would not hesitate to use them. And even if he could struggle free and run, he couldn’t leave Maria.
He felt rather than saw Maria’s fear build as they approached Wapping prison.
Dawn was breaking and the heavy stone walls of the building inched into view.
They were quiet, contemplating the approach.
‘Do you think they mean to burn us?’ whispered Maria in a quavering voice.
‘Maybe they will find our innocence before they make us stand trial,’ said Charlie.
Maria clamped her mouth shut and stared straight ahead. There were tears in her eyes.
Charlie thought back to what he knew.
The murdered girl had been burned, according to the constable.
This was fire then. The third. He had assumed that the killing would stop outside London. It still didn’t make sense to him. Malvern the avenging soldier was high-born, scheming and clever. Malvern as a witch-killer . . . . His actions were illogical and peasant-like. Something didn’t fit.
Today was the day when Malvern’s plan was due for fruition. Had he already planned for a fourth girl to die? A water death, to complete his master spell?
The guard waved them forward into
the prison.
Thick walls were joined by a heavy wooden door. Inside was cold and a set of steps led downwards. The guard gestured they should descend.
And as they were led down further below ground the air took on an oozing damp which seemed to catch at the lungs immediately. Maria began coughing violently, and Charlie remembered her laboured breathing on the road to Wapping. He wondered how much she had been hiding her ill-health, brought on by the dysentery.
They reached the bottom of the slippery spiral staircase and the guard led them along the length of corridor. Impossibly thick stone walls encased them on every side and iron grille as thick as a man’s arm enclosed the various cells.
At the end stood a dank open cell. In it were some thirty prisoners, standing or sitting dejectedly on the straw-strewn floor.
One man lay apart from the others, bearing unmistakable marks. He was in the dying stages of the plague. Even in the gloom Charlie could make out the distension at the neck. Plague buboils had stretched the skin obscenely taut, where it throbbed tight and shiny over deep swellings of hardening blood.
The shirt had been torn away to expose the map of infection across his tortured body. A network of bruises and raised claret-coloured veins twisted out from his armpits in heavy raised blisters and down to his groin in a web of black and green.
Maria froze and backed into the guard behind her.
‘You cannot make us go in there!’ she cried. ‘It is certain death! That man has the plague. Where is your pest house?’
‘This is the pest house,’ said the guard. ‘We are overrun with plague.’
‘We have not been convicted of any crime!’ said Maria. ‘And you condemn us to death.’
‘There is a barrel of plague water in there,’ said the guard, as he threw them into the cell and closed the bars behind them. ‘The constable will be along to begin your trial,’ he added, pressing his face at the iron bars to deliver the news.
Maria flung herself at the door as the guard exited and began shouting their innocence. Then having assured herself he had left she leaned back against the bars, her face wrenched into an expression of hopelessness.