Wormwood

by G. P. Taylor

  Blake took a step back from his guardian and looked at the soft earth of Conduit Fields. He stood in his dirtied boots, his clothing covered in grave mud, the collar torn on his coat, and the pain of his wrists throbbing beneath his cuffs. Abram was tall, clean and neat. The gold trim of his black coat was fresh and vibrant in the first light of morning. From across the fields Blake heard the sound of loud conversation. Abram allowed him several more moments in which to think, to soak up the last embers of night before he had to face the light of the sun.

  Abram turned and began to walk quickly towards the sound of raised voices breezing across from the far side of the sunlit fields. Blake followed, not knowing why or what lay ahead. In the distance he saw two small gatherings, their long shadows burnt into the baked clay and tufts of grass. He quickly realised that ahead of him was a duel, and he heard the seconds shouting the argument and demanding an apology.

  The combatants stood grimly back-to-back, entrenched in their anger, unwilling to admit their guilt. Pistols were double-charged, cocked and raised to the heavens. Steps were about to be taken on a walk that for one would lead to death – either for the Squire with his long wiry hair and country coat, or for the Dandy with his powder wig and painted red lips. A drummer-boy began to beat out the slow drawl of the funeral beat. It came back as a whisper from the walls of the tall white houses that flanked the southern side of the fields.

  The second in his white socks and long periwig shouted out the steps: ‘One … two … three …’

  Abram took long strides in time with each count, covering the ground at three yards to the beat. Blake feebly followed on behind, trying to catch up.

  ‘Eight … nine … ten.’ The second paused, covering his face with his hand, unwilling to see the outcome of his master’s fate. Both men turned to face each other in the growing dawn. The wigged Dandy aimed feverishly, quivering, his hand shaking. He closed his eyes and fired. The hammer fell on dry powder that flashed in the chamber, igniting the charge and blasting the lead ball from the muzzle of the gun. The Squire stood his ground, feet firmly rooted in the dark earth as he waited, and the shot flashed by his head and whistled away behind him.

  There was a long silence as the roar of the gunshot echoed and ebbed away. The Dandy opened his eyes and looked up. Before him the Squire raised his pistol and took a long, steady aim. No one moved as tears began to roll across the painted rouge cheeks of the young man in his French silk coat and fopcuffed shirt.

  ‘No!’ shouted Abram. He strode towards the Squire, intent on stopping the gunshot.

  With a flick of the finger the trigger was eased and the hammer fell. The Dandy clutched his chest. A wave of heat engulfed his body and the ruby grail splattered the green grass. The blast lifted him from his feet and cast him to the ground.

  Abram ran to him and lifted his powdered face from the red earth. He stared into his dead, lifeless eyes lined in black kohl that matched the smudged beauty spot on his left cheek.

  ‘He’s dead, man. Leave him!’ shouted the Squire, smoothing his thick country coat and wiping the embers of burning wadding from his chest. He held the smoking pistol in his other hand, tapping it against his breeches to remove the powder char from the barrel. ‘He knew the price of an insult and he paid it with his life. From the north I may be, but I will never be wronged.’

  ‘Was it worth a man’s life, to satisfy such a trivial thing?’ Abram asked as he knelt beside the corpse.

  ‘This is our way. You foreigners will never understand. A man’s honour is worth more than his life. I have my pride and for that I am willing to die. It was him or me, and my pistol prevailed.’ The Squire handed the pistol to his second and turned away.

  ‘So you walk away and leave him for rats and dogs to gnaw his bones?’ Abram shouted at the man.

  The Squire stopped and turned to Abram. ‘Do you want some of what he got, Frenchman? My powder is dry and I’m sure he’d leave you his pistol as his will and testament. He was a mollie, a painted fop, a mad Macaroni who thought more of lip-paint than life. He was an insult to manhood.’

  Blake looked on, transfixed. Here was his chance to escape his guardian, but all he could do was to stare at Abram as he knelt by the corpse.

  ‘Lead may poison the soul, but he that gives life can assuage such passion,’ Abram snapped at the Squire, who proudly gloated over the body. And then he ripped open the dead man’s shirt and plunged his hand into his chest, forcing open the circular wound as he buried his hand deeper. Blake watched as Abram searched the innermost parts of the body with his fingers and then began to pull his hand from the bloodied cavity, lifting the dead fop from the ground. There was a loud squelch as the blood oozed and gurgled in the deep wound.

  Suddenly, Abram’s hand jumped from the wound. In his fingers he grasped the large, round lead ball that had smashed the Dandy’s chest. He threw it at the Squire. ‘Take your poison and turn it into gold. This will not end in death,’ he said, wiping his hands on the man’s fine white shirt. Then he paused and looked around him.

  Blake stood frozen to the spot. Both seconds stared in disbelief as Abram formed a solid fist with his right hand and hit the Dandy in the chest with a heavy blow. ‘Life!’ he shouted as loudly as he could, the sound shaking the ground on which they stood and reverberating through their bodies. ‘Life for this man, not death!’

  Abram grabbed the corpse and lifted him from the ground, standing him on his feet. The smell of burning flesh filled the air as the open chest wound began to billow sulphurous smoke into the fresh morning air.

  The Squire grabbed a sword from his second. ‘This is witchcraft and you both deserve to die.’

  Abram held the corpse upright with one hand. ‘Stand your ground, Squire, or you will stare in the face of my anger.’

  The Squire didn’t move. He pressed the tip of the sword into the ground and began to mutter under his breath, twisting the blade.

  Abram looked into the eyes of the corpse. ‘It is time to live,’ he said quietly as he let go. Everyone stood still, no one dared move. The corpse teetered and rocked backward and forward. ‘Don’t listen to his moaning, you can have life and live to the full.’

  Then the eyes of the corpse opened and stared at Abram. The man began to cough and choke, spitting blood towards his assassin. He coughed again, even louder, and babbled as he cleared his throat, trying to speak.

  With one swift movement, the Squire lifted the sword from the ground and thrust it towards the body of the man. Abram snatched the blade in his hand, holding it firmly in his grip. ‘He lives – and nothing you say or do will take his life again. Your honour has been satisfied and your pride still rules your heart.’ He held tightly to the sword and twisted it from the Squire’s grip. ‘Now go. This is a place of life and your body sweats death. Go!’

  Abram pulled the sword from the Squire’s hand and threw it to the floor.

  ‘I’ll see you in hell for this,’ the Squire shouted, stepping away and nodding for his second to follow. ‘No man – do you hear? – no man has ever done that and lived. Who do you think you are?’

  ‘I am who I am, that’s all you need to know,’ Abram replied, ‘and hell is a familiar place to me.’ He placed his hand on the Dandy’s chest, pressing it to the wound. ‘As for you, my painted friend, life will never be the same.’

  Abram turned to Blake, who had stood speechless as he watched the morning unfold, then looked around Conduit Fields and saw that a crowd had gathered. ‘There’s nothing to see here,’ he shouted. ‘A near miss and a Dandy who can’t shoot straight.’

  The Dandy gripped Abram’s shoulder and whispered to him as he wiped away the blood from his mouth. ‘I know who you are, and I will never forget this.’

  11: The Kadesh of Blood

  As Agetta woke from a fitful sleep the image of Blueskin Danby was still etched vividly in her mind. The morning sun burnt bleakly through the dirty glass of her bedroom window. Her mother was awake and taking breakfast. She was prop
ped up against her pillow, a dirty white nightcap draped half across her face as she patted down the bedclothes and wiped the crumbs of bread from the bed.

  ‘You’re late up, Etta,’ she said in the croaky voice of a woman twice her age. Mother Lamian had endured forty years and drunk her height in cheap gin several times over. ‘Blake will be wanting you soon and so will your father,’ she said as she slurped back the bottle that she cradled like a child, mumbling to it as she rocked it in her arms.

  ‘They can wait,’ Agetta replied as she brushed a long strand of hair away from her face. ‘I have things to do for me and a call to make to a friend.’ She jumped from her bed fully dressed, trying not to look at the furrowed heap that was her mother. ‘You’ll be here when I get back?’ Agetta asked sarcastically as she stepped towards the door. ‘Don’t be doing anything that may tire you out. After all, father has plenty of time to look after you and run the house.’

  ‘He knows I’m sick. Heart of gold, that’s what he has. It’s called love, maybe you should try it,’ Mother Lamian shouted at her daughter.

  Agetta felt her mind whirl as she was overcome with a coldness that clawed through her body. ‘I know you are sick, but not in the way you think. As for love – this family has no knowledge.’

  She slammed the bedroom door and jumped into the long hall, where she looked towards the dark stairway. There was no sign of Blueskin, just the lodger sleeping on the floor, gurgling and snoring beneath his frock coat, his muddy black boots twitching with each snort. As a cold shudder ran down her back and her mind took her back in time, she thought of Tegatus manacled and alone. She smiled, hoping that he could somehow see her, hoping that one day he could be free. Agetta shared his captor: pain upon pain and word upon word had forged chains from which she felt there would never be freedom.

  A noise from the kitchen filled the hall and distracted her from her thoughts. She ran down the wooden stairs as loudly as she could, hoping that the sound would frighten away the ghosts of her mind. She charged into the kitchen, where Sarapuk sat like a large rook-faced bird at the end of the table. He gave a half-smile as she came into the room and shivered as if he rustled his unseen feathers.

  ‘My pretty girl,’ he said slyly. ‘What a delight to see –’

  ‘Don’t even think it, Sarapuk!’ Agetta said, unsure where the words had come from, as if they had been whispered to her by another voice. ‘I’ve no time for you. Blake waits for me and at least he pays for my company.’ She turned and grabbed a piece of bread from the table, deliberately brushing a large pile of crumbs and broken eggshells into Sarapuk’s lap as she did so. ‘Sorry, Mister Sarapuk, I am so molly-handed.’

  Sarapuk grabbed her arm and gripped it tightly, pulling her close to him. She could smell the chicken breath that hung on each of his browned teeth. ‘Careful, girl,’ he said as he pulled her even closer. ‘What the father doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve.’

  Agetta quickly grabbed the large bread knife that lay next to the remnants of the morning loaf. In an instant, Sarapuk was staring down a long blade that hovered at the tip of his scaly nose.

  ‘Another inch, Mister Sarapuk, and I will take this knife and carve the soul from your body. Doubtless I will be quicker at finding it than you will ever be.’ Agetta spoke as if they were the words of Yerzinia speaking through her. She had no fear and the consequences didn’t matter. ‘You have two seconds to decide and then I will spill you across the floor and the rats can eat your entrails.’ She stared Sarapuk in the face and smiled.

  His hand let go of her arm and allowed her to step away. He looked surprised, as if he had heard the voice before. She noticed that his hand trembled by his side.

  ‘I went too far. I … I am sorry, Agetta,’ he muttered, looking to the floor.

  Agetta walked to the kitchen door and turned, with the bread knife still clutched in her hand. Without thinking she reached back and threw the knife at Sarapuk with all her might. It twisted through the air, crossing the room in a second and cutting the shoulder of his black cassock coat as it spun by him and slapped into the soft plaster wall, embedding itself to the hilt.

  ‘I need to try that again,’ Agetta said as she stepped out of the room. ‘It was aimed for your heart – if you have one.’

  *

  Fleet Street burned brightly; the sun warmed the stench of the gutter and steam rose from the tepid waters of the beck that fumbled its way to the Thames. It was high tide and the rubbish bobbed in the dirty water where two ragged children knelt in the mud playing with a broken pottery mug that sailed them into a new world.

  Agetta walked briskly through the streets toward London Bridge. Blake would have to wait, Mrs Malakin could change the candles and scrub by herself. Agetta needed to see Thaddeus Bracegirdle and his ghostly children. Quickly she turned the corner and crossed the street and within minutes she stood at the entrance to Bridge Street. A large crowd filled the door of the coffee shop and spilled on to the cobbles, each man trying to hold on to a wide sheet of paper that was the London Chronicle. A newsboy shouted at the top of his voice as he held out copies of the Chronicle: ‘Comet to pass the earth – King to announce a holy day!’

  There was a burble of excited conversation as the people clustered together, arguing over the news. Agetta remembered what Blake had said on the night of the sky-quake, and suddenly it all began to make sense – the comet and the book were linked together. She quickened her step. She wanted to tell Thaddeus, but this betrayal battled against the promise she had made to Blake.

  ‘Why me?’ she shouted. ‘Why do I have to carry this secret?’

  A voice inside her head answered, a soft, gentle, warm voice that whispered against the wind like a far-off cry. Agetta stopped and listened, covering her ears with her hands to block out the noise of the street. The voice came again: ‘Tell him …’

  The command made her shudder with delight and set her senses on fire. It was the right thing to do: promises were meant to be broken, secrets were to be whispered to friends and shared like the scraps from the table. Thaddeus could be trusted, she thought. He had kind eyes and a warm smile. To tell him would make his life complete, he could win back what he had lost and all would be well. Her heart leapt and her hands tingled, and she felt a rush of blood sweep across her face. She was in control of her future, and at last she could make someone happy.

  The door to the bookshop was stiff, as if the wood had swollen and somehow knew of her desire to break her promise. She pushed and pushed until it gave way. Inside the shop there was complete silence. The smell of damp paper and the murky Thames tide filled her nostrils. The high vaulted ceiling echoed her footsteps on the wooden boards as she walked through the maze of shelves to the large wooden desk from where Thaddeus ruled the bookshop.

  ‘Mister Thad!’ she shouted. ‘It’s Agetta, I’ve come back to see you. I have some news of the book!’

  There was a soft scuffle of tiny feet in the far corner by a narrow window. Agetta caught a glimpse, a slight shadow that darted from its hiding-place to behind the bookshelf. ‘I can see you,’ she said, stepping around the large desk to the mounting stool that led up to the waiting-plate from where Thaddeus could see down every aisle. ‘Thaddeus told me about you, I know you are here. Show yourself!’

  ‘They won’t show themselves to you, Agetta!’ a voice said, making Agetta jump and look anxiously around the shop.

  The cellar door opened and Thaddeus walked in carrying a large pile of books. An elegant woman in a winter cloak made of thick, black wool followed him. She smiled at Agetta as she looked up to the desk. ‘Be careful you don’t fall, it’s as high as the gallows,’ the woman said, pulling up the hood of her cloak as she walked purposefully towards the door. ‘Have them sent to Mister Hatchard in Piccadilly, he’s the only bookseller I trust, apart from you, Thaddeus. He will send them to France to my cousin – she will be delighted with my latest find.’

  There was something about the woman’s voice that sent a wave
of trepidation through Agetta. As the woman walked off, she felt her new-found confidence being sucked from her, as if a part of her soul was being torn out.

  ‘It will be my pleasure, Lady Flamberg,’ replied Thaddeus as he put the books down on the floor. He watched Lady Flamberg flow through the shop like poured wine, her black cloak billowing out behind her, before smiling and turning to Agetta. ‘It’s good to see you, Agetta.’

  She interrupted him before he could say another word. ‘I have some news – it comes by way of a broken secret. I promised not to tell but –’ She paused and looked around the shop, hoping for some kind of sign that she could go on, listening for the voice that had told her to break the secret.

  ‘If you promised not to tell then you should think carefully. Secrets are powerful things and words can have a life of their own, they are like arrows that fly off the tongue.’

  ‘I want to tell and I want to tell you! It’s about the book, the Nemorensis. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. The word has been going through my head day and night and since I met you things have happened that I would never have dreamt of.’

  ‘The book? You have heard of the book?’ Thaddeus said impatiently. ‘Don’t break my heart, girl. I have had this conversation with many a man before and every time it has led to nothing.’

  ‘I know where it is and who has it!’ she blurted out, the words racing from her mouth quicker than her thoughts.

  There was a long silence as Thaddeus paced the floor, rubbing his hands through the strands of his long thinning hair.

  ‘I … I can get it for you,’ she said quietly.

  He looked up. ‘For me? You could get the Nemorensis for me? Bring it home to Thaddeus?’ He smiled an excited, childlike smile. ‘Who has the book?’