He only returned to himself after the exquisite spasm of his own little death, when, as the ancients wrote, a man’s soul leaps for an instant outside the bounds of Time itself. In their mutual pleasure, they had whispered together. Words, he understood for the first time, were rungs in a golden ladder that carried him to a place entirely new and glorious. She loved him, she had known it from her very first sight of him, and he had whispered in reply of his adoration, calling her his treasure, his true love, his wanton queen. Now she lay still and dreamy, her heart still thrumming fast. A frond of fern-like weed lay exquisitely pressed against her pink-tipped breasts. He rose to his elbow and surveyed her, every inch of her, like a bounty.
Her eyes opened. She did not smile but gazed at him with her unearthly eyes.
‘I am a little warmer now,’ she said.
She found his hand and pulled it to her secret cleft, drawing him closer in a greedy trance. He licked the cut on her cheek like a lascivious cat. He told her he would never ever leave her, that they were one now, and were bound together for all time.
Tabitha was content to stay on at Eglantine Hall. Nat had no wish ever to see another soul again; but when she asked, he dutifully sent for the constable to inform him of Darius’s fate. Saxton barged in ill-temperedly, looking for a quarrel.
‘Where were you when the prisoner was trying to abduct my daughter?’
‘On the road from Chester,’ Nat replied courteously.
‘So you merely happened to arrive back upon the same night as that blackguard, Darius?’
If he had not been floating on a paradisiacal cloud, Nat might have shot the buffoon down with a well-aimed insult. Instead, he laughed.
‘Yes, you have it, Saxton. I have been hiding the rogue in my portmanteau, all this time.’
Just then the constable caught sight of Tabitha lying in Nat’s bed, and coloured like a virgin boy. Poor fellow, Nat thought; for now, he pitied any man who did not possess her. She sat up against a bolster, still wearing his own green robe, looking flushed and dishevelled and wonderfully provoking, as the constable questioned her. Impatiently, he listened as Saxton prepared a statement about her encounter with Darius. When she recounted Darius’s confession that he was her mother’s murderer, her voice shook. Nat was not certain, but it looked to him as if Saxton was holding her hand across his counterpane. At that moment, he could have knocked the constable’s head clean from his hulking shoulders.
A few hours later, Saxton returned to announce that Darius’s body had been found, bloodied and battered, trapped in the mill’s weir.
‘Sir John is jubilant at the news; and is overjoyed that your mother’s murderer is found, Tabitha. As for me,’ mumbled Joshua, ‘I should never have believed you would risk your own life like that. I will never forget that you saved Jennet’s life. There’s no need to fret about Bess; Jennet will keep her with us till you are up and about.’
Nat paced like a panther, waiting for the constable to leave. If there was any rescuing to be done, he thought, Joshua had wished to do it himself. It must rankle him to be obliged to a woman, especially a woman he so violently wanted, and whom he had lost to Nat himself.
Nat had never before noticed that October was the most abundant month of the year. The summer was not dying; rather the earth was ripening in a short but vigorous explosion of life. Through autumn’s copper-tinted days, he and Tabitha wandered slowly in the grounds of Eglantine Hall; within the crumbling walls grew brambles and yellow crab apples, soon succeeded by purple-bloomed sloes, rose hips and black elders. They unburdened themselves of their childhoods and younger lives, of their secret whims and most profound beliefs. On warm afternoons they reclined in a leafy arbour, and Nat felt himself to be some bold knight from a long-lost tale, courting a beautiful sorceress. Tabitha was surprising, funny, spirited; and also, he marvelled, a most lascivious lover. Each night, in the universe of his bed, they were transformed into twin pulses chasing each other in the darkness. Time, if it existed, was a mere word – their lives were measured in spasms of pleasure before they tumbled into sleep as dawn approached, echoing each other’s deepening breaths.
One such night, Nat told her his speculations on travel through time itself.
‘I once read a collection of letters titled Memoirs of the Twenty-first Century. In it, a fellow possessed a guardian angel that carried letters back and forth into some future date, the year 2019, if I recollect.’
‘I cannot even comprehend such a vast time into the future.’
‘Why, it is only two hundred and sixty-seven years hence. Think of how it might be. I have heard engineers describe machines with near magical capacities quite unknown to us. We might have animated statues to be our servants.’
‘I hope they can dress hair in the latest style and tie those difficult back laces.’
‘Certainly, and pray let the female type be comely and pliant. I can think of many uses—’
She dug him with her elbow but he was in full flow now.
‘And I have also heard of mighty cities run by clockwork. Picture it, coaches driving across the land without horses, their motion arising from the turning of a key. Mechanical looms, ovens and even ships. And flying carriages with powerful springs that send us careering up into the sky like fireworks. I would take my telescope on such a voyage.’
‘I hope you would invite me.’
He pulled his arm even tighter around her and his tortoiseshell eyes shone.
‘I may even give you your own telescope. And if these machines perform all our dreariest labours, there would be more time for love and poetry and bed.’
‘Ah, your ideal world.’
‘A better world. And I would be well paid for my scribblings. Or, listen to this. I would employ an angel of time to fly to a century distant in the future, where he finds my greatest poem. My time-leaping angel would return here with a fair copy. So I would possess my poem before I have written it!’
Tabitha laughed, saying only Nat would contrive such a world, in which poets had all the praise and none of the labour.
He began to laugh, his shoulders heaving with mirth so he could barely speak.
‘So then I copy this poem and sell it to great esteem. The printers keep selling it, I grow rich, and my name becomes immortal. You agree? Yes! But who wrote it? Not me. I merely copied it!’
Their idyll was disturbed only when the doctor called on Tabitha. The man who hobbled in was a sadly diminished figure, bent over a walking stick and looking about himself with disapproval, as if he detected an air of lovers’ deshabille about the place. Before Nat could stop him, he shambled to the wall displaying their speculations upon the murders.
‘What is this?’ he said, pointing belittlingly with his cane.
Nat blushed. On the wall, as clear as crystal, was a paper with the title The Doctor, and a list of reasons why he might have wished to kill his own nephew. He tried to remember if Saxton had also stopped to read their conjectures. Dammit, he was too short of sleep to remember.
‘I am a writer,’ he mumbled. ‘Such matters intrigue me.’
‘A scribbler, eh? We all, sir, believed you to be a gentleman. I pray you do not think to publish any scribblings about these persons to whom you are so greatly obliged.’
Nat felt a stab of shame that might have been his conscience at work. Why, this was the merest sampling of his sins. To his knowledge, his pamphlet on the Bloody Almanack had not yet been seen in Netherlea; each day such ignorance continued, he was filled with gratitude, and prayed it might remain so. Yes, he had enjoyed writing it, and had welcomed the money it earned – but now that it was finished, to be identified as its author struck him as a nightmare beyond endurance. Nat made a stiff little bow to the doctor, who dismissed him with a wave of his fingers.
When the doctor had departed, Tabitha relayed his diagnosis.
‘The knocks to my head and back are pretty severe, and he has given me a salve for the cut to my cheek. He did not remark on the bruis
es to my thighs …’ she teased. ‘I must stay abed a whole month, though that will be no suffering if you will join me.’
‘He does not like me,’ said Nat.
Tabitha pulled an amused face. ‘He is jealous. For an ailing man, he is rather a gallant; he has always cast a greybeard’s twinkle in my direction.’
‘He saw our speculations on the wall. If only I had covered them with a cloth. I don’t care to think of him telling his brother about it.’
‘I thought you were Sir John’s friend?’
Nat felt trapped again. ‘“Friend” is not quite the correct term.’ Even as he spoke, he hated his pedantic tone.
‘Well, what is the correct term, then? They are all suffering heavy misfortune, Nat. The doctor is dying. Sir John is unwell, too. There is talk that neither may survive the winter.’
‘Good God.’ Nat turned aside to mask his consternation.
‘I know. There is something sinister at the heart of this.’
He shook his head, unable to find any words.
‘I am sorry you don’t like the doctor,’ Tabitha went on. ‘I have told him I’ll help him with his papers again as soon as I’m up and about.’
‘Why?’ He was irritated by the news, recalling the hostility in the man’s jaundiced eye. ‘We have money. There is no need for you to work.’
‘It is a pleasure for me. Truly. He is sick; I enjoy helping him.’
‘But do you trust him?’
‘Yes, I do. He has helped me at every step, has he not? He has given me a cottage, respectable work, kindly regard; and even,’ she hesitated, ‘kept me out of the way of his brother when he calls.’
Nat nodded, placated. Then he glanced at the tattered pages on the wall and raked his fingers through his hair.
‘Back to our inquiry, then. I have news of Mr Dilks.’
He saw he had her immediate attention. ‘Firstly, I am afraid, I made inquiries and found that he was indeed at the Bishop’s Palace the night your mother died. On the other hand, I made enquiries of a man I still know at Trinity and discovered that Dilks was dismissed from his position as chaplain there. The matter was kept quiet, for it involved a young pupil of his. The boy was punished much too brutally.’
‘No! Poor boy.’
‘It seems he was beaten – viciously beaten. His parents threatened to go to the law. And there was a question of – I would say this only to you, Tabitha – of unnatural practices.’
‘Did you know that Dilks was also Francis’s tutor? There was a falling out there, too; Dilks thrashed him so severely that he complained to his father. Perhaps Francis was killed to keep the parson’s unnatural behaviour quiet? What else did your friend say?’
‘That Dilks has powerful allies. Lady Daphne takes his side and will barely speak a word without his instruction. She and the De Vallory family made certain he took refuge in Netherlea after his dismissal.’
‘Do you think he hopes, through her ladyship, to gain control of the estate?’
‘Quite possibly. I heard, too, that her ladyship is prone to nervous attacks, and mystical – some might say lunatic – visions. God forbid Sir John were not fit and well. Dilks need only appoint himself her guardian to take the reins of all.’
‘I am sure it is he,’ Tabitha said. ‘While you were away, I saw Lady Daphne waiting for Dilks outside the church. They both regarded me with the utmost malice, as if I had witnessed them conspiring in secret. As for her ladyship, I know she is disturbed in her mind; but remember how she threw that threat from De Angelo into the fire? I fear them both, Nat. I am only tolerated here because the doctor insists I stay on as searcher.’
Nat stroked her hair. ‘I don’t care to think of you in danger like this. Promise me that you will not pursue De Angelo alone.’
‘I promise. But neither must you endanger yourself, Nat. Promise me that in return.’
‘Very well.’ He rapidly kissed her fingers. ‘To other matters: I made enquiries in London about the almanack’s printer. The address on the frontispiece is a sham. Number thirteen St Paul’s Courtyard does not exist. Apparently, it is something of a joke; an ancient thoroughfare that did once exist but was destroyed in the Great Fire. It is commonly used as an address by printers hoping to evade their creditors.’
‘So what do you construe from that?’
‘That De Angelo is both clever and ruthless.’
‘And do you believe he is Dilks?’
Nat pressed his lips together tightly and shook his head. ‘He is a likely suspect. Without evidence, though, that is all I can say.’
THIRTY
A Riddle
I’m seen on high in yonder sky;
I’m seen below where waters flow;
I’m seen on breasts where honour rests.
My several meanings now determine:
Reverse me, and I stand for vermin.
The 30th day of October 1752
Luminary: Hunter’s Moon in the Last Quarter.
Observation: Trine of Jupiter and Mars.
Prognostication: A beneficent aspect seems to predominate over other malignant rays.
For many days Tabitha stayed indoors by the fire, warm in the crook of Nat’s body, as a deluge of rain rattled against the high oriel windows. When the rain finally stopped, he told her to wrap up warmly, as he wished to show her a great marvel of nature. He dressed her in his swaggering shagreen coat, fastened with shining buttons, and gold braid edging the deep cuffs. Laughing, she set his second-best cocked hat on her head at a rakish tilt. Once outside, she inhaled a lungful of frosty air, and it revived her like an elixir.
‘You must not see where we’re going.’
He tied a kerchief over her eyes and led her by the arm like a blind woman all the way down the lane. She squealed at her helplessness; from the way her shoes slipped on frozen mud, he seemed to be taking her out towards open country.
‘Are you hoping to drown me?’ She laughed.
He made no answer, but slowly guided her through a gate, and along a narrow path whose edges fell away into water. Finally he turned her about and stood behind her.
‘Open your eyes.’
He removed the kerchief and she looked. The water that surrounded them was a vast black satin mirror, perfectly reflecting the night sky, joining the heavens and watery earth in a giddy diorama of infinity. She rocked on her heels, feeling that if she stepped forward she might plummet down and down into the fathomless stars.
Nat threw a pebble into the water, and the universe at their feet rippled as a million stars blurred and collided; gradually, the water stilled and the whole glittering panoply returned. There were two quarter moons, one above them like a silver feather, while its contrary twin basked in the blackness below. Both moons appeared magically suspended, like an act of levitation performed on the grand stage of the sky.
Nat clasped her, and the length of his body pressed against her back as he breathed in her ear.
‘For thousands of years men and women have watched that mysterious moon as it voyages through dark oceans, and have wished upon it, wished for their hearts’ desires.’
She looked from one to the other of the twin moons, seemingly in two distant regions of the universe, yet each exerting the force of tides, directing blood and dreams and poets’ fancies.
‘Man, even with all his ingenious tinkering and invention, has made nothing to compare to this.’
It was true, she thought. What had paltry humans created to compare to God’s great revolving universe? They had only their own little universe, the magnetic forces between hearts and minds.
‘Do you see that shining light? It is Venus, the planet I worship.’
He pointed, and her eye followed his forefinger, landing on a twinkle of quicksilver-blue.
‘Here.’ He made a movement, as if plucking the planet from the heavens; then drew his cupped hand down to show her what he had caught. ‘For you.’
He uncurled her fingers and dropped something into her pal
m – not a tiny planet, but something circular and metallic. He slipped the ring on to her finger and raised it high, so she could just glimpse a glittering speck of light. ‘A star for you to wear forever.’
She flexed her hand, and felt emotion swell joyfully within her.
‘Will you have me, then? To have and to hold?’
‘To be buxom in bed and in board?’ Her voice was breathless as she repeated the old country vow.
‘Yes, please, lady.’
She turned about carefully on the narrow spit of land, and he was a silhouette of darkness, starless and gigantic, like the first ever shadow cast of a man. She fingered the jewel that jutted from the crown of the ring. She was happier than she could ever remember.
‘I will love you till the stars fall, Nathaniel Starling. And I will wear my star forever, in remembrance of this night.’
Towards the end of another delicious evening, Nat reclined beside her on the bed, caressing the undulations of her body.
‘I would never have known you had borne a child.’
It was innocently spoken, but Tabitha’s every sinew tightened at his words. He didn’t notice, but leaned over her, eager for love.
‘My love,’ he said, trailing his fingertips across her shoulder, ‘I will be glad to take Bess as my own, if you wish it, and if her father does not object. Does he live here in the village?’
‘I swore an oath,’ she said dully.
‘To this man? Surely any promise is null and void, now we are so content together.’
‘No. The oath is binding.’
She turned away and covered herself. Sweet Cupid, the urge to confess was so strong she could barely resist it. Yet always it rang out in her head – that she had made a blood oath and must never break it. ‘Maybe one day I will tell you. Only give me a little more time.’
Without protesting further, he kissed her on her brow. Grateful, but surprised, she wondered why he did not press her. Then, at some subterranean level, she recalled his own hedgings and evasions. But such troublesome thoughts, she decided, were best forgotten, for the time being at least.
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