by Alys Clare
Neither of which factors prevent him from opening his mouth and, with no terrified hands to suppress the noise, howling far more loudly and penetratingly than Denyse.
TEN
I knelt on the floor, avoiding the blood, and stared down at the corpse.
In my life at sea I’d seen horrors. Men in disbelieving agony with parts of themselves ripped away. Men screaming with fever, crawling with alien parasites, crushed and broken by falls, accidents, mishaps: ships are not safe places, even when they’re not engaged in combat. Men weeping because they’ve endured more than they can stand.
But I’d never seen anything like Lady Clemence Fairlight lying before her own hearth in a pool of her own body waste with the heart ripped out of her body.
Theo, crouching beside me, said in a voice I hardly heard, ‘Was it an animal attack? The serving maid did say she’d seen a large wolf lurking outside.’
I shook my head. ‘Unless a wolf can wield a knife, then no.’ I pointed to the long gash that stretched from just beneath the collar bone, widening to gape open over the broken ribs and ending a hand’s breadth above the navel, sunk deep in rolls of flesh. ‘That cut was not done by claws or teeth.’
I heard Theo suppress a groan and swallow a couple of times. When he spoke again, however, he had controlled the nausea and his voice was steady. ‘Human agency, then.’
‘Yes.’
‘A man.’
I wasn’t sure if it was a statement or a question. I replied anyway. ‘Not necessarily. A strong woman with sufficient resolve could have sliced open the flesh of the chest and upper abdomen, provided the knife was sharp and long enough’ – for the cut went deep – ‘and could also have smashed the ribs with another implement such as a mallet so as to give access to the heart.’
Theo swallowed again. ‘Is it not very difficult to—’
But he didn’t seem to be able to go on.
‘To extract a heart? No, not if you have in your hand the knife that made that cut. Basically the heart is held in its place by blood vessels and a tough sac of membrane that is attached to the skeleton and the diaphragm. You just have to slice away the—’
Theo made a retching noise, and I realized I was telling him far too much.
I twisted round to look at him. It was only when I turned from staring down at what had been done to Lady Clemence that I appreciated how I’d been fixated upon her. I made myself blink, and knew from the sharp little pains in both eyes that it was a while since I’d last done so. ‘Has the knife been found?’ I asked. ‘And the mallet, or whatever it was? And the …’
He knew, of course, what I referred to. He shook his head. ‘They’re searching, but nothing yet,’ he said tersely. ‘I’ve sent for more men to come and join in as soon as it’s fully light.’
I nodded. ‘I’ll need to see – er, whatever is found,’ I said.
He was frowning, I noticed; I guessed he had a question to ask. ‘Would you – would the person who did this have to be a surgeon, or a physician?’ he said presently.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘Many if not most people know where the heart is. Think of how many folk slaughter their own animals.’
‘But this isn’t a pig or a bull calf!’ he protested violently.
‘I appreciate that.’ I tried to make my tone soothing. I could see how distressed he was. ‘But pigs, cows and sheep all have a heart too, and its anatomy and function differ little from that of a human being.’
Abruptly Theo stood up. He looked furiously angry, and I guessed it was at the horror of what had been done here. Quite often, I’ve noticed, when terrible things happen, the mind somehow becomes confused and displays the wrong emotion. I’ve seen the bereaved who are broken at the death of a loved one wail at them in a fury of accusation, as if it’s their own fault they’re dead.
‘“Tis a vile thing to die, when men are unprepared and look not for it,”’ I muttered.
Theo nodded. Mastering his emotion, he said, ‘She can’t have expected this. To die by such violence, in her own home.’
‘She can’t,’ I agreed. Then, for I sensed he needed the reassurance: ‘I think it would have been swift. The very brutality suggests to me that this was done with great passion, and the killer would not have wished to linger.’
He gave a sort of snorting laugh. ‘Some compensation, I suppose.’
I’d forgotten about the pair of Theo’s officers whom we’d left standing out in the hall, either side of the foot of the staircase, and when one of them now came into the room, cleared his throat and spoke, it made me jump. Judging by the abrupt way Theo spun round, I guessed it was the same for him.
‘Begging your pardon, Master Davey, Doctor Taverner, but what should we do about that?’
I stared at the young man, only then realizing it was the thin, pale youth – Gidley – who had been present when the vagrant’s body was recovered. I felt sorry for him. If that earlier discovery had made him vomit, what must this one be doing to him?
‘About what, Gidley?’ Theo asked, not unkindly.
The pale youth’s eyes widened in amazement. ‘That, sir!’ he said in a sort of hissed shout. ‘That racket!’
And then, shocked that I’d been so absorbed with the corpse and its terrible injuries that I’d managed to block everything else out, I heard it.
Somewhere not far away – not nearly far enough – someone was screaming. Rhythmically, repeatedly, incessantly, and at a pitch that, now I was attuned to it, I understood must be all but unbearable for anyone nearer. Gidley, for example.
‘It’s the daughter, sir, the one that found her,’ Gidley said anxiously. Then, his natural diffidence when speaking to his superiors overcome by horror, he blurted out, ‘It’s not natural! They’re saying she’s possessed, that she was found with a knife in her hand standing over the body, that she’s always loathed Lady Clemence and did her in!’
‘Don’t listen to the wild gossip of frightened servants,’ Theo said, going over to the lad and putting a kindly hand on his shoulder. ‘All we know for sure is that it was Mistress Denyse who discovered the body, and that her screams alerted her brother-in-law, who sent for us.’ Gidley was watching him intently, eyes wide with alarm. ‘Anything else is nothing but speculation, and you, as an officer of the coroner’ – Gidley visibly stood up straighter at the description of himself, which had clearly been precisely Theo’s intention – ‘have a duty to remain above such talk.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Gidley said, a firmness in his voice that hadn’t been there before.
‘As for what we shall do about the noise,’ Theo went on, ‘we shall try to stop it.’ He glanced back at me. ‘Doctor Taverner has finished with the body for now’ – he raised his eyebrows at me and I nodded – ‘and so arrangements will be set in place for its removal to my cellar, leaving the doctor free to go to Mistress Denyse.’
I stood up and, overcoming a sudden profound lassitude that had little to do with having been dragged from my bed before dawn and summoned to this carnage and everything to do with my deep reluctance to face the madness that I knew awaited me, I picked up my doctor’s bag and did as the coroner bade me.
Everyone fears madness.
Those who have the courage to tend and care for the sad unfortunates among us who have lost their minds and their reason manage to find a way to cope with their fear, and they have my sincere admiration. I’ve encountered madness a few times in my life and in my medical career, from poor, simple Tock – harmless but pretty much witless – to the ship’s carpenter whose brain appeared to melt in the ravages of delirium, making him believe that he was a monkey who had been made a saint, or perhaps even a god, and that the rest of his shipmates, officers and ship’s surgeon included, had to crawl on their bellies to worship him. He died, fortunately for everyone including him, but the group of sailors who were foolish enough to indulge in the fiery, fiercely alcoholic and highly toxic drink prepared by a band of natives on an island off South America weren’t so lucky. Their madness endured all
the way back across the Atlantic. The captain – on advice from me – had no option but to lock them up in chains in the hold, for their own and everyone else’s safety, and the howls, screams, oaths and terrible sounds of crashing violence that we all endured for seven weeks have stayed with me ever since, not to mention the stench of five men constrained in a small space, their food hurled in and not let out to piss, shit or wash. The last I saw of the doomed sailors was as they were carted away, hooded, bound, still fighting, to the care of the monks.
I did not expect any such horror in the bedchamber of Denyse Fairlight.
Which goes to show how wrong you can be.
Her room was right at the far end of a long corridor, and just before it was the open door of another, larger room, the two chambers clearly defined as a separate space cut off from the main body and life of the house. As I walked past the larger room, a tall woman emerged. It was Mary, and she no longer looked calm.
‘Thank Jesu you have come,’ she breathed when she saw who I was. ‘She’s been at it for hours and appears unaware of all attempts to comfort her. In here.’
I followed her into the room at the far end. It was small and ill-lit, the one little window concealed by heavy curtains and, to judge by the smell, firmly closed. The screaming was by now deafening and for a moment, shocked into silence and immobility, I stood and stared at the woman who was making it.
I would scarcely have recognized her from the previous time I’d seen her. Then, despite the mania in her eyes and the illogicality of the peculiar things she said, she’d been decently dressed, washed, tidy. Normal. The word slipped into my mind before I could censor it.
Now she looked entirely different.
The voluminous nightgown was bloodstained and, as if aghast at the sight of the bright red on the fine white linen, she had tried to rip away the soiled parts. The modest neckline gaped, revealing heavy white breasts resting on folds of belly. She sat on the bed with her legs wide apart – I noticed bruising – and the rolled-up skirts of her nightgown displayed her pubis. Her long hair was tangled and disordered, torn from its night-time plait probably by her own frantic hands, and hung around her face in heavy, greasy hanks. She was deathly white apart from two patches of hectic colour on her cheeks.
Her eyes were wide open, the whites showing all around the pale irises. Her mouth, too, yawned gapingly, and there was a small cut to one side. I could see the rotten teeth at the back of her jaws and the red, pulsing throat. There was a rhythm, I noticed, to the screaming: it would rise in a crescendo in five repeated bursts of sound, and then there would be a sixth, louder and longer. Then there would be a silence – my ears throbbed when it came – and just for a moment the thought would come, Thank God, it’s stopped. Then it began again.
Mary and I stood close together in the doorway. At first Denyse gave no sign that she’d noticed us. Then I thought I saw a quick flick of her eyes, to Mary, to me. Just for an instant the screams abated. The they started again, if anything louder and more intolerable than before.
Perhaps it was the pain in my ears; perhaps the aftermath of being roused from deep sleep to ride several miles as fast as I could to stand over a mutilated, brutalized body was making me a little short. Whatever it was, I acted without thinking. I strode across the room to the bed, sat down beside the screaming woman and said loudly, kindly and very firmly, ‘That’s enough, now. You will do damage to your poor throat.’
Denyse stopped in mid-scream. She had turned to stare at me, and now a strange, twisted smile crossed her face. Tears filled her eyes, spilling out to run down the plump, dirty cheeks. Then she said, ‘My throat already hurts badly.’ And, before I could stop her, she flung her arms round my waist and dropped her head in my lap.
I had no idea what to do. Acting on instinct had at least stopped the screams, so I did it again. Raising a hand, I began to stroke the harsh, disordered hair. I kept the action smooth, soothing, and I started to talk softly to her. ‘What a shock,’ I said gently. ‘What a dreadful thing, to find your poor mother dead.’ There was a horrified gasp from the doorway. Mary was staring at me, her face aghast.
Looking up at her, I said, ‘There is no purpose to pretending it hasn’t happened. Nor, indeed, that Denyse did not witness the body.’
‘But we never speak of such things before her! We always keep her ignorant of—’ Mary began. Then, folding her lips on whatever else she’d been about to say, she dropped her head and fell silent.
I returned my full attention to Denyse.
I knew I had to be careful. I’d just assured Theo that a woman was capable of having done the carnage downstairs, and, as we’d been told, Denyse had been found right beside her mother’s body. It was possible, I had to admit – even, perhaps, likely – that she’d carried out the killing.
Even if she had, I reasoned, she was in deep distress and her mind was clearly disturbed. All the time; not just now, because of what had just happened. I was a doctor, and I had taken a binding oath.
‘You must rest,’ I said softly. ‘Mary shall find you a clean nightgown, and bathe your face and your sore eyes. You shall have a warm drink and something to eat. What do you like best?’
‘Cake,’ came the instant, muffled reply. ‘Cake with currants and spices.’
I glanced again at Mary and, nodding, she slipped away.
I went on stroking Denyse’s hair.
It seemed wrong to sit there on the bed with her while so much of her body was revealed by the torn and rucked-up nightgown, and I reached out for the blanket that lay folded across the end of the bed and spread it over her. It was coarse and hairy, and not very clean. I’d noticed other signs of neglect in the room: the floor was stained, with a drying puddle of something brown and noxious beside the far wall. The curtains were torn, hanging off the pole at one end. Denyse’s damaged nightgown was far from new and didn’t fit her very well. It was, I’d have bet, a cast-off of her mother’s or sister’s.
She gave a soft little sigh and snuggled closer to me. Then she said, ‘I saw a dead body before.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘so you told me.’
She sighed again, more deeply. ‘Everybody dies,’ she said.
‘But you—’
I was going to tell her she wouldn’t die for a long time because she was still young, but she interrupted. ‘I wanted to hear what they were talking about,’ she said suddenly, in an urgent whisper. ‘Everything is horrid here and they are all so anxious. They bite their lips and grow pale with anxiety, and nobody has even the tiniest bit of patience with me when I get things wrong in my head and make them cross. Mother beat me even harder than usual, and Avery said I must be shut in the cellar in future when people visit, at least until I learn to curb my tongue.’ She stopped, and I felt her plump body shake as she sobbed. ‘He stopped up my mouth as a punishment and he left me like that,’ she whispered. ‘He said it was to teach me to guard my words.’
She had, I reflected, just explained both the heavy bruising on her legs and the cut in the corner of her mouth.
‘I thought they’d be having their secret talks when it was dark, down in the big room,’ she went on, her voice all but inaudible, ‘and when I woke up in the night, I went down to see if I could listen at the door. I often do that,’ she confided, ‘and I have very many places to hide so that they don’t know. But when I went down, I couldn’t hear them. I went on into the room, in case they were speaking really softly, and then I saw …’ She stopped.
‘I know what you saw,’ I said. ‘I saw it too, and it was dreadful.’
She nodded, the rough head rasping up and down against my belly. ‘There was blood on her nightgown,’ she muttered. ‘And a big hole in her.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed.
You still could have killed her, I was thinking.
There came the sound of hurrying footsteps, and then Mary was back. She had a bowl of steaming water in her hands and a clean nightgown over one arm. She took in the sight of her charge,
lying down quietly with her head in my lap, and nodded; with approval, I thought.
‘That’s right, Mistress Denyse,’ she said soothingly, ‘nice and peaceful.’ Meeting my eyes, she said, ‘Food and drink are coming. I’ll wash her now, and prepare her for bed.’
She came up to the bed, and took Denyse in her arms. It was with relief that I relinquished her. I felt a kindness in Mary; whatever brutalities were meted out to Denyse from her family, the woman who had the care of her seemed to be different.
As Mary stripped off the soiled nightgown and squeezed out a cloth in the hot water, I turned away and reached into my bag. I still had some of the potion that Judyth had given me to sedate the dogs, and I didn’t think a small dose would go amiss now. I waited at the door for the kitchen maid bringing Denyse’s cakes and warm drink, taking the tray from her. I put it on the floor, there being no table of any description in the room, and carefully put two small drops of mandragora into the drink.
Presently Denyse, washed and dressed, her hair brushed so that some at least of the tangles were gone, was in her narrow bed, propped up on pillows. I handed the coarse pottery mug to Mary. ‘I’ve put a sedative in it,’ I said very quietly to her. ‘Your charge needs sleep now.’ And so do you, I thought, taking in her pallor and the deep lines round her eyes, with their look of strain.
She nodded. Sitting down on the edge of the bed, she held the cup to her charge’s lips and waited while, greedy as a child, Denyse gulped it down.
I didn’t wait to watch her scoff the little cakes.
Theo and I rode slowly in the wake of the cart bearing the body of Lady Clemence. We were heading home for food, a brief rest and a change of clothing; both of us were soiled with blood and body waste. Theo would be returning to Wrenbeare later. Two of his officers had been left at the house, still pursuing the hunt for the murder weapons and the heart and, now that the sun had risen, with a great deal more urgency. Halfway back to Theo’s house, three more men hurried past us in the opposite direction. They paused to hear Theo’s instructions, then raced on.