The Secrets of Blood and Bone

by Rebecca Alexander

  He reached out for a tall pole beside his house to halt the boat, and the oarsman secured ropes. Marinello sprang onto the pier, then reached a hand to steady me, less used to the waves.

  “I commend your courage, little man,” he said, but with only half a smile. “Watch yourself with the Contarinis and their kind, my friend. They are a pack of wolves.”

  Chapter 11

  PRESENT DAY: BEE COTTAGE, LAKE DISTRICT

  The badgers stir beneath the ground in the sett they have won through generations of territorial battles, cave-ins and upheavals. They scratch themselves awake. The garden tolerates them: they do more good than harm, rooting out slugs and snails, digging out superfluous nests of rats, and they keep the rabbits down.

  Bees stir in the hives, stretching crackling wing joints, tending the new eggs. The workers are old, needing more honey than the hive can spare, so they work until they die. The hive buzzes and wonders where the witch is. A few launch themselves into the cool air in the middle of the day, but there is little nectar and the cold dulls their muscles until they drop under the hive. It doesn’t matter. There are thousands more.

  Jack was early for Ellen’s inquest, and watched the local people enter in ones and twos. High windows filled the paneled room with light, which painted shapes on the north wall of the court. There were several reporters and as the evidence unfolded she realized why.

  The coroner called the pathologist to the stand. “Dr. Chen, you have performed a postmortem on the body of Miss Ellen Jennifer Ratcliffe, I understand?”

  “I have. I have also asked another pathologist, Dr. Edward Lemmon, to perform a second examination. This is a very unusual case.”

  “Is Dr. Lemmon in attendance?”

  “Since we concurred, broadly, on cause of death and the manner in which the body presented, I have his report here for the court. Dr. Lemmon would be willing to attend if necessary, on a separate date, but he is unable to be here today.”

  “Well, let’s hope we don’t need to question him, then.” The coroner, a spare man in his fifties or sixties, smiled thinly around the court. No one laughed. “Carry on, Dr. Chen.”

  “The body was that of a poorly nourished elderly woman, consistent with an age of seventy-nine years old. She had evidence of type two diabetes, and her blood sugar was raised at postmortem.”

  “What evidence was this, doctor?”

  “She had a condition called acanthosis nigricans, extensive abnormal skin pigmentation. And her feet had ulcers with some areas of ischemia. Poorly controlled diabetes is a cause of circulation problems and enervation of the extremities. On examination, other complications of diabetes were recorded, including some sight impairment.” She scanned her notes. “Blood tests, of course, confirmed it.”

  “And what conclusion did you reach about the cause of Miss Ratcliffe’s death?” The room, previously a little restless with the odd murmur, became quieter.

  “I found indications of heart failure. But…” She paused, looking uncomfortable. “Dr. Lemmon and I concurred that the fire may have started before death occurred.” She looked around the room. “Miss Ratcliffe was found close to the fireplace, and there was evidence that a coal fire had been lit there recently. It is possible that an ember caught her clothing alight, and that Miss Ratcliffe died as a result of pain, or shock.”

  “I see.” The coroner frowned at people starting a buzz of whispers. “You say this is likely?”

  “No, I said it’s possible. The body was…I have never seen a case like it. This phenomenon is rare even in the literature.”

  “Can you explain?” The coroner leaned forward. Jack noticed the woman next to her was scribbling furiously in what looked like makeshift shorthand.

  “It is possible for the human body to burn very slowly, over a considerable period of time. The clothing acts as a wick, and the slowly melting body fat is drawn up and burned above the body like a candle. We were unable to find evidence of the initial flame or ember, however.”

  The coroner’s face was a picture of dismay. “I hope you aren’t suggesting some sort of paranormal manifestation?”

  The doctor winced. “Unfortunately, even scholarly journals have called this form of burning spontaneous human combustion. But there’s nothing paranormal or spontaneous about it. The body was hosed down by the fire brigade—it’s perfectly possible that evidence of an ember was simply washed away.”

  The fire officer’s evidence was about dousing the smoldering floor and clearing the hoarded rubbish in the living room so it didn’t catch. Looking around the courtroom, Jack caught the eye of Maisie Talbot, sitting bolt upright, staring straight back at her. Jack looked away, but when she glanced back, there was the stare.

  Maisie looked even smaller in the court. Jack suspected her feet didn’t reach the ground from the chair she was perched in. Her hair was dyed red, a white blaze down the center parting where her hair was growing back. Her face fell into stacks of wrinkles around her mouth and radiated from each eye. She sat with her back straight, in a black-and-white herringbone jacket, and a large brooch set with some sparkling stones on the lapel.

  “Mrs. Maisie Talbot.” When the name was called, the woman finally broke eye contact and slipped out of her chair. She walked with as much dignity as someone barely four and half feet tall could manage. She sat in the witness seat, her feet swinging a little, like a child’s.

  The coroner smiled at her. “You went to see the deceased on the evening of the fire?”

  “I certainly did. I took a taxi from my home, and went to Bee Cottage to see Ellen Ratcliffe. I arrived at ten minutes past seven, by my watch. We—that is, the taxi driver and I—saw the glow of the flames through the sooty window.” Her voice was gruff.

  “Indeed. And the driver called the fire brigade, is that so?”

  “I instructed him to do so, while I attempted to rescue my friend.” A flutter of surprise wandered around the room, and the witness turned and stared at Jack, addressing her next words to her. “The front door was unlocked.”

  “Did you enter the house?” The coroner glanced at Jack too, so intense was the old woman’s stare.

  “I did. It was unlocked, which was out of character for Ellen. I pushed open the door, calling my friend’s name loudly.” She turned back to the coroner for a moment. “I looked inside the living room and when I saw…when I saw that life was extinct, I returned to the garden to await the emergency services.” She looked back at Jack, her voice shaking. “I have never seen anything more shocking in my life. My friend, killed and burning like a pile of rubbish. Killed.”

  The word rattled and echoed around the silent court.

  “Yes, yes, thank you, Mrs. Talbot.”

  “I have never known her to leave her front door unlocked. Indeed, if Ellen had one weakness, it was a paranoia that the house would be broken into.”

  “Yes. Thank you for your testimony. We will consider all the facts, of course.” The coroner’s voice was firm. “Please return to your seat.”

  The little figure slid down onto the floor and walked, not back to her chair, but through the courtroom and out of the double doors at the back. Her patent leather shoes clacked on the wooden floor. The assembly waited until the doors had swung back before they started talking again.

  The rest of the inquest was straightforward, and the verdict of accidental death was recorded. Jack was already pushing the doors open when she heard the word, and she looked around for the old woman. She found her outside, smoking a cigarette under a NO SMOKING sign, defiantly blowing the blue haze against an office window.

  “Mrs. Talbot?”

  “You came.” Her face twisted up into a grimace. “They didn’t listen. In thirty years, I have never known Ellen to leave the front door unlocked. It wasn’t just unlocked, you know, the door had been forced open. The police didn’t believe me.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  The old woman scowled at her. “I told the police. They shuffled me off l
ike I was demented. They said the frame was too old and rotten to prove the house was broken into.”

  Jack leaned against the wall and brushed away a tendril of smoke. “Who would want to hurt Ellen?”

  The old woman snorted, and stood on tiptoe to stub the cigarette out on the sign. “Health nazis all of them,” she muttered. “I’m eighty-four, and a pack a day and a few nips of sherry will keep me going. Ellen, young woman, knew things,” she said, looking at Jack with the intense stare. “Things that were threatening her. And Magpie’s coming?”

  “Maggie, yes.”

  “I knew her when she was just a girl visiting Ellen on her school holidays. I never liked her much,” she added. “Full of modern, New Age tripe. Smart girl, though.”

  “You said Ellen would never have left the door unlocked. But she knew you were coming, didn’t she? Maybe she left it open for you.”

  “You haven’t been at the cottage long, have you? Even if Ellen did, the door would have locked itself, or stuck. The place is like a prison, it protects itself.” She started walking down the road, rolling with a crab gait on legs that looked bowed. “Come on, I need to show you something. I hoped Magpie would come, but you’ll have to do.”

  Maisie’s house wasn’t far away, but the old woman paused for breath a few times, spat orange phlegm onto the pavement and started off again. Her home was a tiny Victorian end of terrace, the only one in the row with the original windows, the frames painted a garish green and peeling into the wind. Jack looked up the stone walls, hardly an inch of which was free of ivy, lichens or moss. It made a vertical garden to make up for the tiny concrete forecourt in front of the house. Ellen unlocked the door and Jack followed her inside. The house looked about twelve feet across and the door led straight into a living room.

  Inside the house every surface was covered with ornaments. Books and china sat on shelves, each in its own place, and the whole lot was embedded in a layer of dust and ash. The room reeked of tobacco smoke and the walls had a brown glaze, enhanced by the light feeling its way around heavy curtains, half drawn, and the nicotine-yellow window.

  Cats were plumped like cushions on an upright sofa and two armchairs. A pair of tabbies and one black cat, which stared with luminous eyes for a moment before slinking off, and a fat ginger took up most of the sofa. Maisie led the way through to a back room, a sort of kitchen, equally cluttered.

  “Sit down,” she said, pulling out an old chair that looked full of woodworm.

  “Thank you.” Jack sat carefully on the chair, but apart from a few creaks, it held her weight.

  Maisie took Jack’s chin in one hard, knobbly hand. The fingertips dug into her face before she could object, as if they were reaching for jaw and cheekbone. Maisie leaned down, her tobacco scent adding to what smelled like lavender and mothballs. The old woman stared into one of her eyes, then the other. When she let go, Jack’s teeth were clenched.

  “You’re not a witch.” The old woman turned away and reached for a battered, blackened kettle, and put it on the hob of a cooker as old as the one in Ellen’s kitchen. She lit the burner with a trembling match, the gas lighting with a whoosh. “You aren’t a witch. But you’re not…” She turned her gaze back to Jack. “I don’t know what you are.”

  “I’m Jackdaw Hammond. Maggie is my foster mother.” Jack looked around the kitchen. “She brought me up.” The room was square, lined with stained and torn floral wallpaper. In the middle was a faded table with a Formica top, wobbling on spindly legs and surrounded by three mismatched chairs. The underlying smell was sharp and caught in Jack’s throat—cat urine, stale food, and drying herbs. Along the ceiling was a rail, hung with bunches of dried stems, some dusty and brown, some still green.

  “Jack for short?” The old woman poured water, clinked cups. “I don’t have any sugar.”

  “That’s fine—no, black is fine, too.” The milk seemed to have separated, but Maisie still poured some into her own cup. Jack hoped the hot water would kill anything living in it.

  “So. Ellen was murdered, you believe that?” She sat on another of the old chairs, peering over the rim of her cup at Jack, her head on one side like a bird.

  “Who would murder an old lady?”

  Maisie waved her free hand. “That I already know. What I need to do is prove it.”

  Jack looked into the brown brew. She could see rings of previous use lining the mug, and put it back on the table. “You may have your suspicions, but all the evidence points to an accidental death. She was…a bit eccentric, a bit strange at the end by everyone’s account. She wasn’t looking after herself very well.”

  “Of course she wasn’t.” Maisie slurped her hot tea, with every appearance of enjoyment. “She was under siege from the Dannicks.”

  Jack stood up, looking around at the kitchen. The garden, which she could see through a steamed-up side window, looked almost as overgrown as Bee Cottage’s. “Do you mean Henry Dannick?”

  “They’re big landowners around here. They say they were descended from Vikings. They own the land around the cottage. They have married into the Ratcliffes over the years and I know Ellen had Dannick cousins.”

  “Henry Dannick came to the house.” She looked down at the old woman, meeting her dark eyes. “He wanted a herbal tincture that Ellen used to make for his family.”

  Ellen snorted. “Describe him.”

  “I don’t know. Fifties. Tall, heavy but not fat. Good-looking, strong jaw, blue eyes, dark hair.” She shrugged. “He was very persuasive, told me a child is really sick. Ellen used to make a hair-root tincture for him, apparently, and he wants us to supply it instead.”

  “Tincture, he said, did he?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Maisie finished her tea and folded her arms across her slight chest. Her hands were large for her body, the fingers gnarled as tree roots. “Sir Henry Dannick, the man you met, is eight or ten years younger than me.”

  “What? No—”

  “And the grandson you spoke about? He’s seventeen or eighteen by now.” Maisie cackled at the expression on Jack’s face.

  “I don’t understand.” The man Jack had met seemed too young to have a grandson of that age. She leaned on the plastic table for a moment, then realized how sticky it was and moved back. Perhaps Maisie’s potion worked like Maggie’s did, as part of a spell. “What’s this tincture for, anyway?”

  “Ah. There’s a story.” Maisie lit another cigarette, and made herself comfortable on her chair. “It started with Thomazine Ratcliffe back in the fifteen hundreds. She was the first woman to live at Bee Cottage: her husband built it. But she didn’t have any children, and she kept bees and grew herbs for the locals. Then one day, according to legend, one of the Dannick sons rode past and saw her working in the garden. The walls were just enough to keep the animals in, then. He raped her, and she got pregnant. The story goes, she didn’t tell her husband but named the child ‘Amyas,’ beloved.” She dragged a deep breath through the cigarette and puffed blue smoke across the room. “But every day, tending the garden, she found stones, and placed them on the wall, building them higher. Legend has it that her precious trees dug them up for her, to keep the Dannicks out.”

  “So this Amyas—”

  “Got sick. He grew weak as he got older. Like the Dannick boy, Callum, some muscular dystrophy thing. The Dannick boys sometimes get it, especially the golden-haired ones, the ones they call the ‘Dannick Lions.’ ”

  Jack leaned back, making the chair squeak more fiercely. “And this Thomazine found a cure for her son?”

  “The Dannicks had a cure, of sorts, but it made them mad. Thomazine was learning herbal medicine from her mother, Margery. They made up this potion to save the boy. In the end, the Dannicks acknowledged Amyas as one of theirs and somehow, with the treatment and being brought up alongside the Dannicks, he got better. There’s even a picture of him up at the castle.”

  “So, Thomazine had to deal with her rapist?” Jack looked around the
kitchen, now her eyes had adjusted to the gloom.

  “To save her child? Of course she did.” Maisie stubbed out her cigarette and struggled to her feet. “Get my walker, will you? I’m a bit stiff.”

  Jack saw a frame by the back door, and put it in front of Maisie. “This Callum has the same disease?”

  “And the Dannicks need the potion to finish their ritual.”

  Jack stepped back as Maisie gripped the handle and started to shuffle forward. “So this is a magical cure?”

  Maisie cackled a laugh. “Yes, why would they get Ellen to make it, otherwise? That’s not all, though.” She pushed the walker forward in increments toward the back door, which streamed with condensation like the windows.

  Beyond the kitchen was a single-glazed lean-to, housing an old twin tub washing machine, a rusty chest freezer and the door to the garden. On the top of the freezer was a cage about the same size, partly covered with a floral curtain. As Maisie shuffled over the floor, a rustling like dry leaves alerted Jack to the living creature inside. With a flourish that made the unseen bird flap, Maisie whipped off the cloth. She revealed a large bundle of black feathers, sheened with violet and green on the wings. The bird turned its head to glare at them, hunched in the inadequate enclosure. The beak seemed too heavy for its sleek head, one brown eye closely observing Jack. The feathers were tattered, and new shafts were sprouting along the length of one shoulder.

  “It’s a raven.” Jack was enchanted. She had lived in the shadow of a rookery most of her life, and she and Maggie had rescued corvids—members of the crow family—but she had never seen a raven up close.

  “It’s just a young one; Ellen was bringing it on. I took it for her when she started worrying about the Dannicks. I should have taken the cat, too, but I thought my tabbies would fight with him.”

  “She knew something was going to happen?”