A Rustle of Silk: A new forensic mystery series set in Stuart England (A Gabriel Taverner Mystery)

by Alys Clare

  I didn’t stop to ask myself why I felt such an urge not to be heard.

  My desk stands in the wide window, and entering the room via either door means whoever is at the desk has their back to you.

  Leaning over my desk, every inch of the tall, thin body exhibiting tension, was a dark-clad figure. Even before some small noise from me alerted him and he spun round, I knew who he was.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. I tried to keep my voice calm, reasonable. ‘May I be of assistance?’

  His gaunt, sallow-skinned face stretched in a smile. ‘Oh, how relieved I am to see you!’ he exclaimed. ‘I had come seeking you on a minor matter, but that is not important.’ He waved a slender hand. ‘The lady of the house – your sister, I believe?’ I nodded. ‘She welcomed me most hospitably, insisting on providing refreshments – very good ones! – although I tried to persuade her there was no need, and—’

  ‘What are you doing up here?’ I interrupted, my tone a little cooler. I stared pointedly at my desk and the documents spread upon it, then raised my eyes to meet his.

  He strode towards me, hands out as if in supplication. ‘Doctor, you must forgive what surely appears to be a most discourteous intrusion into your privacy.’ I noticed, as I had done before, the foreign accent; the way in which some vowel sounds were lengthened and exaggerated. Discooourteous. Preeeevacy. ‘But your sister was taken ill, and, knowing of course that you are a doctor, I have hurried in here, much against my natural instinct, to see if I may not find some remedy to restore her among your supplies, a—’

  I had stopped listening. Already turning, hurrying towards the gallery, I said urgently, ‘Where is she? In her room?’

  ‘Sí, sí – yes, on her bed, I thought it best to—’

  I ignored his anxious explanations and ran along the gallery, through Celia’s anteroom and into her bedchamber. She was lying on her side on the bed, a warm coverlet over her, one hand under her cheek. She looked as if she was heavily asleep. I picked up her wrist. Her pulse was steady. Her colour was good, and I bent over her to check her breathing. My face close to hers, I smelt something—

  And then I felt such a blow to the back of my head, where neck meets skull, that my vision turned black. There was a great burst of pain, and I felt myself falling.

  I came to my senses to find myself sitting in my own chair. He must have brought it in from my study. He is stronger than he looks, I thought vaguely, for the chair is solid and heavy.

  My hands lay on the lion heads with which the chair’s arms terminate. My wrists were bound to those arms. I tensed my muscles and strained against the cords, but they were very firm.

  Ignoring the blaze of pain, I raised my head.

  He was standing before me. Meeting my eyes, he said, ‘I am very sorry, doctor. You have been kind and considerate towards me, as has your sister, and I am profoundly ashamed to have treated you in this way. I—’

  ‘What have you done to my sister?’ I demanded. ‘If you have harmed her, you will pay for it with your life.’

  ‘Please, do not concern yourself for her. She is unharmed; merely deeply asleep,’ he said quickly.

  ‘You drugged her.’ I recalled that smell as I’d bent over her. ‘What was it?’

  ‘A concoction of my own,’ he replied, ‘and – for I see you are still anxious – one I use regularly myself. Please, I say again, she is not harmed.’

  ‘How did you get her to drink it?’ Glancing round, I noticed the tray on the little side table, with its goblets, jug, platters.

  ‘I must confess I tricked her,’ he admitted. ‘I pretended to be feeling unwell, and she came hurrying over to assist. While she was thus distracted, it was a simple matter to reach out my hand and slip the potion into her goblet.’

  ‘A fine way to repay her kindness,’ I said coldly.

  ‘Doctor, I know, believe me I know, and I hope you will tender my sincere and heartfelt apologies to her when she wakes.’

  That, I thought, was grounds for hope: the priest appeared to anticipate a time when both Celia and I would be free and able to converse normally.

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked. ‘You’re a Jesuit, aren’t you? Are you a fugitive? Of course you are!’ I answered my own question. ‘I have to tell you that although I—’

  He held up a hand to stop me. ‘Once again, forgive me, doctor, but I’m afraid you really do not understand.’

  ‘Why, then, don’t you explain?’

  He sighed, turned towards the window and stood staring out over the peaceful fields and woodland. ‘Why don’t I explain?’ he echoed softly. Watching him intently, I thought some of the tension went out of his shoulders. He glanced at me, then returned to his contemplation of the view. ‘Perhaps I should, for I owe it to the good doctor here.’ He sighed. ‘And, after all this time, all these years of secrecy, I yearn to share the tale.’

  There was what seemed like a very long pause. Then he began to speak.

  ‘I was born in Venice and raised first by nuns, then monks, and finally given into the care of the Jesuits of the church and school of Santa Maria dell’Umiltà in Dorsoduro. They have quite a presence in the city, as indeed in many places, and support for them throughout the city states began to grow rapidly from the middle of the last century, when they founded one of their great colleges. They are great educators, you know.’ He nodded, as if to underline his claim.

  ‘Shouldn’t that be we, since you are one of them?’ I said. He simply smiled.

  ‘The Society of Jesus will educate any boy, whatever his class and no matter how unfortunate his background,’ he went on, ‘and, indeed, some say that it is among the least advantaged of this harsh world that they find some of their best priests.’ He moved away from the window, drawing up Celia’s little foot stool and sitting down on it, close in front of me.

  ‘Let me tell you a story,’ he said softly, ‘of one such disadvantaged boy, alone, grieving, in despair, who had the good fortune to catch the eye of the very man who could help him.’

  He paused, perhaps collecting his thoughts. I studied his sallow face, in which his eyes – large and a pale hazel colour, hooded and thickly lashed – burned with whatever intensity drove him. ‘This lad of whom I speak was illegitimate; born to a woman who had been impregnated and discarded, as so many are. Far from home, she had nowhere to go when her time came and, since she had no husband and therefore could not go to any place where gently reared ladies are tended, there was no option for her but to throw herself on the charity of the nuns at the paupers’ hospital. They did what they had to, and a boy child was delivered, along with many a lecture on the woman’s evil ways and the great sin of fornication, for which, as she must appreciate, she was now being punished. Well, she tolerated the punishments and the harsh regime – no kindness there, not for sinners – until she was sufficiently recovered from the brutality of the birth to pick up her child and drag herself away. She had a place to stay – that at least had been provided – but it was in a poor quarter of the town, inhabited by the wicked and the desperate. No place, in short, for one such as her.’

  He paused, almost as if to allow me time to comment. I had nothing to say. He had the story-teller’s skill, and already I was enthralled.

  ‘The boy grew and, to her amazement, he thrived. She made many sacrifices for him, giving him the better part of every scrap of nourishing food she managed to acquire, and inevitably it followed that her own health suffered. When plague struck the city in 1575, the first few cases growing by the following year into an epidemic that took thousands, she had little strength with which to resist.’

  He paused, turning away to gaze out of the window.

  ‘When she first fell sick,’ he resumed, ‘she was transported, with her little boy, to Lazaretto Nuovo, for that is the island where those suspected of suffering from the deadly disease are taken for assessment. The Venetian authorities are very efficient,’ he added, ‘for it is also the quarantine island where, in normal times,
crews and cargos from ships arriving from plague spots are sent while those in charge decide whether or not infection is present. When it is found to be so, patients are moved to Lazaretto Vecchio, as was the case with the woman of whom I speak.’

  He paused again, now staring down at the floorboards beneath his feet. I sensed he wasn’t seeing them, for his mind was far away. ‘It is a terrible place,’ he said quietly. ‘A place of pain, torment, anguish, despair, for, once there, barely a soul returns. Back then, at the height of the outbreak, the corpse pits filled up as fast as they could be dug.

  ‘And then, as if all that horror was not enough, a new one came. Rumours began to circulate of a special kind of ghost; a ghoul that belonged to the malevolent company of the masticatione mortuorum.’

  I tried to translate the Latin. ‘The … the chewing dead?’ Surely I’d misheard.

  But he nodded. ‘Very good, doctor, although the usual expression in your language is shroud-eater. For those credulous, superstitious fools who believe in such phenomena, it’s a particularly dreadful example,’ he went on, ‘which would have us believe that a certain type of the undead takes up residence in graves – mass graves, obviously, being preferable – where they are heard to make hideous chewing and grinding noises, and who have it within their power to bring death and the impulse to destruction to those who venture too close. In a time of plague, when death seems to leap from one person to the next with such ease and when whole families can be wiped out in a matter of days, it is perhaps understandable for the ignorant to seek a supernatural explanation; although, for myself, I do not believe that a man should ever lose his reasoning power, even in extremis. But I digress.’ He flashed me a swift smile. His eyes were wide, and as brilliant as if he had a fever.

  ‘So, there we are on the Venetian plague islands, among the dead and the dying, and out among the mass graves frightful noises are heard. What happens next? Well, the nuns and the monks and the medical men are already at their wits’ end as each one tries to perform the work of a dozen, and they have little choice but to try to stem the incipient hysteria. So they investigate the noises and, wanting to put an end to the terrifying tales, they unearth some of the most recently interred. They light upon one corpse – that of a woman – who does indeed seem to have moved, for she has her hands stretched up above her as if trying to dig up through the earth and find the daylight and the air. The holy men and women know they are doing wrong – the shroud-eater, they know, is a malign invention that forms no part of God’s world – but they must try to stop the panic. So what do you imagine they do?’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t know,’ I said quietly.

  ‘There is a renowned remedy for putting an end to the antics of the chewing dead, and they employed it. They dragged that woman’s body out of the grave, they prised apart her jaws – not hard to do, for there was no stiffening – and they thrust between her teeth a large lump of brick. Someone screamed, there was a great moan of agony, a spurt of blood. The man holding the brick was scared out of his wits, for he believed that the horror stories were true. He thought the dead woman had become reanimated, and he knew that he must at all costs put an end to her, right there and then. He pushed the brick in harder, there was an awful choking sound, a cracking as if of breaking bone, and he let the corpse slide back into the grave.’ He stopped, the echo of his words ringing in the silent room. ‘There were no more reports of grinding and chewing noises, and it was concluded by the monks, the nuns, the medical men, the sick and the dying that the remedy had worked.’

  Images of horror filled my mind. I shook my head, as if to dissipate them, but it did no good.

  ‘The woman’s name was Rose Willerton,’ he said after what seemed a long time.

  Rose Willerton. Yes.

  ‘She had been engaged to be married to Nicolaus Quinlie,’ the priest went on softly, ‘but when her highly influential family had a spectacular fall from grace, he decided she wasn’t the wife for an ambitious man. What, though, could he do? By then he had seduced her, taken her virginity, made her worthless for any other marriage and, as if all that were not bad enough, he had made her pregnant. To abandon her now would harm his reputation even more than marrying her, so instead he decided she must disappear.

  ‘So he told her family she had died. She had been on a visit to see him, to view the house he was preparing for them after their marriage, accompanied by her personal maidservant and a young groom. It was not a long journey there from her father’s house, and she had not planned to stay for more than a few hours. She was well chaperoned. But Nicolaus saw his chance and took it. He sent the groom to join his own staff for the midday meal, and told the maid to wait while he showed his fiancée around the grounds of what was to be her home. A little later, he came racing back, in dreadful distress, with the news that Rose had suffered some sort of accident – or perhaps it was a fit – and lay dead in a little copse on the far extremity of the grounds. The maidservant, aghast, wanted to rush to her young mistress’s side, but Nicolaus prevented her. “She would not wish you to see her thus,” he said firmly, then, in a low voice that only she could hear, added, “And better, I think, for you to start looking to yourself, for surely there will be difficult questions to ask. Such as, why did you not accompany your mistress down the garden, and why were you not present to give whatever help you could, that might just have saved her life? My goodness” – he pretended the thought had just occurred to him – “you’d be dismissed and you’d never find work again! You’d die in abject poverty, outcast and shunned!”’

  His tale was so plausible that it had taken me a moment to discover the flaw. ‘How can you know this?’ I demanded. ‘You cannot have been present.’

  ‘No, I was not,’ he agreed. ‘However, I know the bare bones of the matter. If I add a little conjecture to make my tale flow the better, you will, I am sure, understand my reasons.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The maidservant – she was a mature woman – saw the good sense of that. Meekly bowing her head, she said, “Then I reckon I’d better get on back to her father, and tell him the terrible news.”

  ‘“I reckon so too,” Nicolaus agreed. He slipped her some coins. “I shall bury her here,” he announced, “in a tomb fit for the great lady she was, and so I shall keep her with me always.”’

  Keep her with me always …

  ‘He couldn’t bring himself to kill her,’ the priest went on. ‘He knew he couldn’t marry her, yet she carried his child in her womb and, somewhere in his cold and calculating heart, he recognized that he had once had feelings for her. He ran back to where he had left her. He had, it is concluded, incapacitated her in some way; in all likelihood with a drugged drink, for he was known to be very skilled in such matters.’ He paused, shooting me a quick glance, as if inviting me to comment on the fact that he had just done the same to Celia. I kept silent. ‘Then he proceeded to the next part of his plan: to remove her from his estate, the county, the country, and get her far away; so far that she would never be heard from again, dead to family, friends and the world.’

  And Nicolaus Quinlie, I thought, would have had ships at his disposal even back then, and loyal crews who did not ask too many questions.

  ‘Did she not protest, I hear you wonder.’ The priest’s eyes were intent on mine. ‘Did she not, once she had arrived at her destination and begun her exile, manage to contact her father, tell him what had happened and where she was, and beg him to rescue her? Ah, I am quite sure she was tempted, many a time, but let us not forget that she was pregnant. She had allowed Nicolaus Quinlie to bed her and impregnate her and she did not dare reveal that to anybody who had known her in her past life, her upright, virtuous and rigid father in particular. No: Rose knew she had sinned – knowledge that was reinforced by every nun, priest and religious she encountered, and they were legion – and she recognized that this was her punishment.’

  ‘She was still alive when they unearthed her, wasn’t she?’ I felt sure
of it.

  He spun round to face me. ‘I believe she was.’

  I nodded. For an instant, I identified with his actions. I might even have done the same in his boots. ‘So Nicolaus Quinlie, who was responsible for all her suffering, had to endure the same death.’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘You are, of course, his son.’

  He bowed. ‘I am. Tobias Willerton.’ He gave an ironic bow.

  ‘You were raised and educated by Jesuits and you became one of them,’ I began, ‘and—’

  But he said coolly, ‘I am no Jesuit.’

  ‘What?’ I could scarcely believe it. ‘You disguise yourself as one at your peril, then!’ I exclaimed. ‘Do you not know what is done to Jesuits here? Have you never heard of Edmund Campion?’

  He brushed my amazed remarks aside. ‘Of course. But as I see it, many Jesuits come to England pretending not to be what they are, so why not the other way round? It’s the perfect disguise when I need one since, given recent events, who in their right mind would pretend to be a Jesuit? It’s far too risky. And besides,’ he added, a sly expression in the shining eyes, ‘you have no idea how many doors it opens. I present myself as a stranger, alone, afire with my missionary zeal yet, underneath, very frightened, and the Catholics in this land fling open their doors, their arms and their purses. They take me in, hide me, feed me; give me, in short, whatever I ask for, and all in exchange for the saying of a forbidden mass or two in their pretty little private chapels.’

  ‘That is sacrilege,’ I said quietly.

  Tobias Willerton smiled. ‘I know, doctor. I’ll add it to all my other sins.’

  He’d been raised by Jesuits, I thought. He’d know exactly how they acted. How they moved, spoke, dressed, prayed. He was observant and clever, and those intelligent, determined and zealous priests had encouraged him; had, albeit unintentionally, made him precisely what he was now.