Let There Be Blood (A Lord Ambrose Mystery)

by Jane Jakeman

  Zaraband would be found, of course, eventually, tethered at some distance, so that there was nothing to connect my disappearance with the icehouse. Indeed, I had not mentioned it to Belos: I had merely told him I was going to Crawshays farm. They would look for me there, if anywhere. There might have been a chance of stray lovers coming to the icehouse, or poachers who wanted to use it as a temporary larder for their bag of pheasant or rabbit. But my hopes of such innocents accidentally stumbling on my imprisonment soon faded. News would have spread rapidly that the bodies of the Crawshays had been placed here. No one would come to make love in front of those silent pieces of flesh, no poachers would hang up their venison over a pair of corpses.

  There was only one chance of release, and I did not care to face it.

  If I had been imprisoned intentionally, my persecutor might come back to gloat.

  If someone had a mind sufficiently perverted to play this trick on me, that person would want to come back and see the victim, myself, gibbering with fright.

  Well, I refused to gibber. I had seen too many dead men to fear these two dull English farmers, boring and prosaic even on their marble slabs.

  In the meantime, how long could I last?

  I began to think carefully about it. I could live without food for a week or more. This I knew, for I had done so in Greece. Once I was with a band of irregulars — bandits to the Turks, heroes to the Greeks — and the whole brigade had taken refuge from pursuit in a hidden cave, where we laid up for six days.

  There was a Turkish camp which had been set up in the valley under the mouth of the cave, concealed in a grey cleft of the mountainous rocks above. After those six days, the Turkish soldiers struck their tents and moved away, puzzled, because a prey which had seemed just before them had apparently vanished into the mountains. We had kept total silence in that cave, had pulled our scarlet cummerbunds tight around our empty bellies. We dispatched our wounded comrades with our sabres, lest their cries of pain betray us. It was the first time I had killed in cold blood, and I remember the wet feel of the dying man’s mouth under the palm of my hand, pressed against his lips to gag him as I drew the cutting edge across his throat.

  But we had water in that cave: a pure mountain spring that gushed out in a little stream at the back of the cave, a life-saving trickle down the quartzy rock.

  I must have water. Without it, I could not, in this heat, hold out for more than a day or two. Even down here it would get very hot in the middle of the day. I might manage to get up some of that slithery moisture from the floor, soaking it up in my shirt. But if that liquid were contaminated by the fluids from the bodies themselves, then I were better to be raging with thirst than to touch a drop of it. If there were some water condensing on the walls, then perhaps that would be safe.

  I sat on the steps near the door and let my head sink into my hands, listening to every little sound from the outside world. Birds were singing in the trees, which rustled occasionally in a faint breeze, but no human sounds followed the rustling. Nature alone was at work outside.

  Tormentingly now, I fancied that I could hear the rushing of a stream which I remembered from my boyhood, a pure, cold stream in the woods near this very spot, a stream that had never run dry in those endless summers when I was a child. There I had fished, with rods made out of hazel wands and string, with a wriggling worm stuck on a makeshift hook. I felt again the icy chill against my calves as I waded into the centre of the rushing water.

  It seemed unlikely, at the moment, that I would see that stream again. I sank into a reverie, recalling that distant boyhood, and must have slept for a while, dreaming of the past. I thought of my sister, Ariadne, who had refused to return home to Malfine. Why should she? The house held no childhood memories for her, and she had chosen to make her life elsewhere.

  After Ariadne’s birth my mother did not seem to get stronger. In fact, she seemed fainter day by day. I, by then some nine or ten years of age, was left to play in a corner of her bedroom, listening to the whisperings and the muttered consultations, holding the pomegranate jewel up to the rays of light from the watery panes of glass in the windows. Old Eufemia, the stout maid, muttered about blood flows that could not be staunched, about swellings and clots that came away, and my mother got paler and weaker till she lay in bed all day, with a thin and terrible odour, that I now know is the smell of death from an inner disease, arising from her bed under the aura of perfume, the patchouli and attar of roses with which her linen was splashed.

  For a year after her death, my father shut himself up in the suite of rooms that my mother had occupied. All pretence that he was nothing but a phlegmatic English squire, ruddy-cheeked and impervious to suffering, now vanished. The young man who had fallen so desperately in love with a beautiful Greek girl suddenly reappeared, stricken to the heart by the loss of her. He slept and ate in semi-darkness, never leaving her rooms. The curtains were always closed; he slept in the bed where she had died.

  He did not speak a word to his children. We were looked after by old Eufemia, one of my mother’s maids, for a while, but then the Greek servants were sent back to Italy, for they reminded my father too much of my mother. Ariadne and I were abandoned to a succession of nursemaids, until I went off to school, and Ariadne was taken away by one of my father’s female cousins. In the meantime, I ran wild, eating hand to mouth when I could in the kitchen, running about in the woods as I pleased, grieving, frightened and exhilarated by turns.

  When my father finally emerged from his seclusion, he had lost weight and aged greatly. The cousin who came later on to speak to him about Ariadne’s care and education did not recognise him.

  As for my father, he appeared to recognise no one, except for his little daughter. When she was brought to him, in the hope that she would prove to be a consolation, he began to rave and curse at her as the cause of her mother’s death, which he seemed to blame entirely on the child. He begged his cousin to take the little thing away, and never let him look on her lace again. He made ample payment for her to be reared and schooled as became her rank, but he would not have the child at Malfine, and attempts to reason with him provoked such a fearful rage that the cousin, who fortunately grew genuinely fond of the little girl, did not dare try the experiment of leaving the child with her father.

  And it was now that the name of Danby was expunged from the district, for the machinery of bribes and loans, of sweeteners and softeners, which my grandfather, old Hedger, had started, came to fruition at last and my father, George, was offered a title in token of his father’s discreet financial services to royalty. So mad was he still about his wife’s death that he renamed the Danby lands after Mala Fina, the estate which her family had once owned in Crete, and asked permission to take his own title from that, so that the name of her ancestors would never die and so that I, as her son, would have an inheritance from my mother, even if it were only a claim to some remote and rocky shores in the Aegean. Mala Fina became, Englished, Malfine.

  Thus Castle Danby was no more, and the mansion now bore the name of Malfine, my mother’s memorial in England, though in the depths of the English countryside the name was mangled horribly, being both foreign and newfangled. And I staked my claim also, with the idiot idealism of youth, not only to Malfine but to my Cretan inheritance, a forgotten Venetian castle beside the wine-dark sea of Greece, for which I later fought, and almost died.

  My mother, Eurydice, had made few changes in her husband’s home. She had put up hangings of rich Italian silks and velvets. George ordered these to be taken down and folded away. They were placed in carved cedarwood chests in her room: the striped satins and the flock-piled velvets in dark colours, crimson and madonna blue and a velvety grape colour that I remember stroking with my child’s fingers as if it were a live pelt, they were folded away from the light and shut up with bags of lavender and tiny grey pieces of ambergris that gave out last waves of rich scent as the lids of the wooden chests were closed tight upon them.

  Shut
away too were my mother’s clothes: the brilliantly coloured embroidered head-dresses in the traditions of her native island, the jackets and aprons stiff with silken threads. With them were laid the elaborate ballgowns George had insisted she should have during her years as his wife, gowns suitable to his wealth and station. With dried rose petals scattered between the folds, they were placed in the great presses of her rooms, and my father hammered in the nails that sealed the doors of her chambers, so that he should not be tormented by her empty dresses, sad ghosts that had once held her living, breathing body within them, silks and satins that were moulded to her shape and impregnated with her scents.

  And they locked away the fantastic jewels which she had brought with her, and with which I had played as a child, jewels modest in value but extravagantly rich in design and imagination. There were chryselephantine beasts, ivory creatures with gold heads or wings, leopards and griffins, set with amber eyes. There was a brooch in the form of a ship with mother-of-pearl sails and golden threads for the ship’s cables, and cloak pins in the shape of dolphins leaping from pearl-studded waves, of birds with red-enamelled wings. These were the Greek jewels of the Malfine women, filigree chains from which swung mermaids with opals for their breasts and green-gilt tails, and there were lustrous deformed baroque pearls in oyster shells with silver cherubs riding on top of them. These I played with as a child, threading them into my mother’s dark hair by firelight.

  What else did I remember? A pendant showing an ivory huntsman with a golden bow slung over his shoulder, who stroked the head of a crouching lion, tamed by the huntsman’s magic. “A great hero, Ambrose,” said my mother as I took that piece in my hands, feeling the heavy warmth of the ivory and the delicately chiselled lines of the beast’s mane. “A hero and a god.”

  And there had been a marvellous jewelled fruit, which I loved to spin round and around like a globe on its silver chain. This had been a gift to Eurydice’s mother from a Greek priest, the Metropolitan of Caesarea, and was a piece of the most exquisite Byzantine workmanship. Imagine a pomegranate with the outer skin cut away, to reveal an interior of garnet seeds, set in a round honeycomb of silver. The garnets flashed a purplish red, like glistening drops of blood, as the pendant whirled around in the light.

  For my mother’s maid, a simple soul, all these jewels had their own purposes. “This is Cretan agate. Look at it and learn, little Ambrose. It will cure all pains in the head and the lungs. And here is cornelian, which restrains anger. And this little tree here, with peach-coloured branches, this is coral, from under the sea. Coral fortifies the heart. You must wear a piece of coral if you are in danger of losing blood from a wound.”

  I remembered her words, years later, under the scorching sun of Greece. I bent over a wounded man, pulled open his shirt to look for signs of life, and found a coral hand tied around his throat, I suppose by some woman like my mother’s maid who had kissed and embraced him before he went away to fight. His life’s blood lay drained away in a great pool at his side.

  There was a remedy for everything in my mother’s jewel box. There had even been a remedy for snakebite, I think — jasper, was it? And cures for all ills of the soul also, for jealousy, for lost love. A little phial of water from a fountain in Cairo, a phial of rock crystal, carved with hieroglyphs and stoppered with jade. “That is water from the Lovers’ Fountain,” said my mother, laughing. “No, it does not make you fall in love — quite the opposite. If you have a terrible love for someone, you must drink it and it will cure you of love. Love is a disease, you see — but it can be cured!” And she put the phial away in a leather case, specially made to keep it safe.

  But one jewel she gave me to keep, a strange thing for a child, a long and snaggled tooth, brown with age, set in a heavy gold ring.

  “This is the tooth of a wolf cub, little Ambrose. One of our ancestors took two cubs from a cave in Crete, after killing their mother. He tried to rear them, and with one he succeeded and it followed him like a dog. The other died, and he had its teeth set into rings for the boys of our family to wear. This you will wear later, for it is too big for you now, but you may keep it round your neck until your hand has grown large enough for it.”

  My father sometimes teased my mother and said that she kept me too much in the women’s rooms, that I should have more manly pursuits, but I had those a-plenty after her death. With the exception of that wolf’s tooth ring, all those bright and glittering toys had vanished from the light into the darkness of my dead mother’s rooms. Into an oak chest went the traces of her religion also, the Cretan icons, with their rows of serried angels with wings of fire. In, too, went the paintings of the Lamentation at the Tomb of Christ, which had terrified me as a child, the dead Christ with unearthly greenish-white flesh. Was that what my mother would look like? I wondered, soon after her death, in my childish nightmares.

  There were other nightmares, later, when I was a grown man, though now I realised that I had not, for several days, experienced the dreams that had come night after night in recent months. In those feverish slumbers, the boat lands again in that little bay beneath the castle which we believe deserted. We disembark, some thirty of us, splendid in white garments with brave sashes, upon that Cretan shore. The cobalt sea, lashed here and there by the fierce sun into dazzling opalescence — black, jade green, lilac, glittering white — stretches out beyond the sands.

  And now the sun is beating down upon the rocks. And upon our dead and wounded, who have been left where we fell, for the soldiers were waiting for us: we have been betrayed, and trapped between the rocks and that flashing sea.

  The soldiers must have their orders: the bodies are to be left where they have fallen. So we still have our garments and our boots, and the wolf’s tooth ring is still upon my finger. I have it yet.

  I alone, of the thirty men who embarked so bravely to fight for freedom, I, a man not of the Greeks but a stranger to these shores, I am still living, under a heap of my comrades’ bodies, my head thrusting out of the sprawling heap of limbs into the sun. Through my partly opened eyelids, I can see that the enemy has posted a sentry, to keep watch over the bodies.

  All day long I must lie there, unmoving, while the sentry guard changes and a new watch is posted, through the full glare of noon, and the merciless afternoon. My clothing is drenched with blood from slashing wounds, for some of the Turkish soldiers had no gunpowder, and set about their opponents with their sabres.

  I do not dare even to move my tongue over my parched lips.

  If I can live till dusk, till I might move under cover of darkness, then there is just a faint chance, the slightest glimmer, of life.

  I lived, to relive, again and again.

  CHAPTER 10

  And now I awoke, and I was home, in England once more, but I came to and realised that I awoke to a living nightmare, for I was locked here in the prison of the icehouse, with the bodies of the dead Crawshays.

  The walls now struck a damp chill into my bones. What was the time of day? Several hours must have passed since I had set out from Malfine. Through the window slits, the sky was getting darker. Dusk was coming.

  Outside the icehouse, things were moving in the woods. I could hear rustling, furtive sounds, scratching noises and high-pitched cries. The creatures of the night were beginning to stir about their business.

  Light thickens, and the crow

  Makes wing to the rooky wood:

  Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,

  Whiles night’s black agents to their prey do rouse.

  Was the murderer who stalked in these parts, the killer of the two men who lay beside me, another of those agents of the night? How long could I remain here alive?

  If a human killer did not find me, that spectral murderer, hunger, might succeed.

  I looked behind me, and saw the dim white shapes outlined on their marble beds in the faint light from the window slits. Food, of a sort.

  I had once talked to an outcast in Greece, a sailor, whom no
man would take in his boat, a sailor who would never again go to sea.

  That man had drifted, with others like himself, on a raft under the burning sun, so he told me. Held the flesh of a dead boy in his hands, a boy butchered like a calf by hungry men afloat on an empty ocean. Such things did happen at sea, yes, though pious landlubbers believed they were too dreadful even to contemplate. Is there in reality anything that is too dreadful for a man to do? I think not. That Greek sailor, for example. The meat of the boy, he had said, was hacked from the long bones by inexpert knives, and the outcast who had stared at me, crouched beside the harbour from which he would never again set sail, he had held that meat in his hands.

  “But I did not eat, lord,” he said to me, but even as he said it I pictured the defenceless bloody flesh held up to his cracked and dirty lips. “But I did not eat.” He had said that over and over again. No one believed him. For he was alive, and the boy was dead.

  The leg which I had injured in my fall began to throb monotonously. I took off my jacket and rolled it into a cushion, and then leant back against the door with the rolled-up jacket as makeshift padding.

  But then, as I was contemplating the past, which had temporarily taken my mind away from this present danger in the icehouse of Malfine, I suddenly heard the sound of a footfall outside.

  I climbed up to the top of the flight of steps and peered through a crack in the door. My partial view, in what was left of the light, showed something black and velvety trailing nearby.

  The edge of a woman’s skirt.

  I let out a shout, and saw the woman start in terror, and I cursed myself as I heard her scream and saw her running away, the black skirt of her riding habit held up in her hands. It was the governess from Crawshay’s, Miss Anstruther.

  “It’s all right! It’s Ambrose Malfine! Can you get me out of here?”