by Alys Clare
But Josiah put up a shaking hand. ‘Enough,’ he breathed.
I waited.
After what seemed a long time he said, ‘It is a terrible disease. A scourge; a fit punishment, some say, for the sin of fornication, although for myself, I do not believe that the loving God inflicts such agonies on his children.’
His remark interested me, and I stored it away for future discussion. Now was not the time.
‘You know it well because you have treated a sufferer,’ I said. ‘No, don’t try to protest, for I shan’t believe you. And I will further surmise that Sir Thomas infected Lady Clemence and that one, if not both, of his daughters bore the sickness from birth.’
He shot me a look. ‘What makes you say that?’ he barked.
‘Agnes Lond is childless, Denyse Fairlight is gravely deformed in body and diseased in mind.’ My words were cruelly blunt, but I was in no mood to dissemble.
‘Oho, so you’ve been reading about that, too, I suppose?’ he demanded.
‘Yes I have,’ I shouted. ‘Another source helpfully listed the symptoms of children born to a diseased mother. Sores and rashes, failure to thrive, sickly, jaundiced, with short limbs and twisted bodies. Malformation of the bones of the face, so that the teeth are oddly spaced and the nose a peculiar shape.’
Once again he waved a hand as if in surrender.
‘I do not wish to distress you,’ I said after a short silence. ‘I am certain that I am right, and—’
‘If you’re certain, why are you here in my house bothering me in my peace?’ he flashed back.
I let that go.
‘I am working with the coroner as he tries to establish the facts of Lady Clemence’s murder,’ I said when I was sure I could speak calmly. ‘I told you before that we’re working on the theory that it was somehow in revenge for the misdeeds of the past; of Sir Thomas’s past, specifically. If I am right in my conclusions regarding what ailed him, and indeed what ails his family, then it is possible others lay the blame for their own sickness, or that of those they love, at his door.’
I expected him to shout at me again. To protest that he couldn’t possibly confirm or refute my supposition. That I should shut my foul, accusing mouth, stop spreading slander about an innocent man who was no longer alive to defend himself and get out.
But he didn’t.
He put his hands up to his face and rubbed it vigorously a few times. Then, lowering his hands, he said softly, ‘I did what I could for him, but it was little enough. And, God help me, a part of me thought he had earned his suffering for he was a terrible man, made a thousand times worse by that sickness-induced madness. When his agonized, labouring heart finally gave up, I fell on my knees in gratitude to the Lord for deliverance.’
His hands covered his face again and I saw his shoulders shake as he silently sobbed.
Without thinking, I got up and went over to him. ‘Do not punish yourself,’ I said quietly, my arm around his back. ‘You did what you could, of that I have no doubt. From what I have learned nothing would have saved him, and I’m tempted to think that a man signs his own death warrant the moment the sickness enters his body.’ Encouraged by the fact that Josiah was no longer sobbing – and furthermore hadn’t thrown off my arm – I went on. Leaning in closer, for what I was about to say was for his ears only, I murmured, ‘As to your vast relief when finally he died, do not distress yourself over it. Who amongst us, who spend our lives trying to alleviate the pains of the sick and the suffering, can deny we’ve felt exactly the same on occasion, if we’re to be honest? The honour is in the trying, Doctor. Provided it does not affect the thoroughness and the intensity of our efforts to heal and to save life, what we feel in the privacy of our own hearts is our own affair.’
He was still now, and I felt the tension seep out of him. I returned to my chair.
Presently he dropped his hands again. He was pale, his face drawn. He looked at me, his eyes calm. He said simply, ‘Thank you. The death of Sir Thomas Fairlight is a burden I have borne for many years. It is good – more than good’ – he smiled faintly – ‘to put it down.’
The mood, I felt, needed to be lightened. ‘You’re welcome,’ I said. ‘One day I shall no doubt ask you to do the same for me.’
Evening was advancing as I rode away from Buckland and headed for Theo’s house. I became aware how tired I was. But my day was not yet finished; I had the strong sense that Theo had been trying to contact me, and, since I hadn’t told anybody where I was going when I set out so precipitately to see Josiah, he’d have had no luck.
The door was ajar and there were appetizing smells of supper wafting around in Theo’s hall. The sudden, violent gurgling of my stomach reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since my bread and honey with Judyth early that morning. I was just wondering if I could beg Elaine for a morsel or two to eat when the door to Theo’s office was flung open and he erupted into the hall.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ he demanded. His face was flushed and his hair stood on end as if he’d been repeatedly raking his fingers through it, as no doubt he had. ‘I’ve been hunting all over for you and no less than three of my men have been out to your house looking for you!’
‘I was at home from mid-morning to late afternoon,’ I said courteously. ‘I was up in my study.’ Guiltily recalling the deep concentration with which I’d pored over my books, I recognized the distinct possibility that someone had come knocking and I hadn’t noticed. If the rest of my household had been absent, then any number of Theo’s men could have come and been disappointed. ‘I may not have heard,’ I admitted.
But Theo had already dived back inside his office, beckoning me to follow. ‘What news?’ I asked as I followed him.
‘Hah! Bugger-all!’ he said.
‘Nothing found?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Then why did you want to see me so urgently?’
‘Because I thought you might have come up with something!’ he said, with the air of a man forced to put into words the self-evident.
I suppressed a smile.
‘And you have no more idea as to the perpetrator?’ I asked.
‘No, although I appear to have succeeded in diverting suspicion from that poor little mad daughter.’
That, I supposed, was something.
I almost asked him what he’d been doing all day to have achieved such a paucity of results, but thought better of it.
Theo, I noticed, was deep in thought, a frown on his face. ‘I hate Wrenbeare,’ he said suddenly. ‘I hate the mood there. It’s … not normal. It makes me feel very uncomfortable.’
I understood exactly what he meant. ‘Me too.’
He looked up at me. ‘Why is that?’
I shrugged. ‘The evil nature of the family’s past, perhaps.’ Before he could ask me to elucidate, I told him.
He was silent for some time when I’d finished. ‘So we have some more substance to our theory that Lady Clemence’s murder is for revenge,’ he muttered eventually. ‘Someone acting on behalf of the vagrant, are we thinking? If Sir Thomas infected the man’s wife, then—’
‘Not his wife,’ I put in gently.
‘Ah. No, of course,’ Theo said. He fell silent again. ‘But it’s all so uncertain!’ he burst out. ‘A thin, insubstantial stranger who might or might not have broken in and been chased away, a batty little maid who says she saw a wolf, and nothing, not one single thing, to give us any idea of why he was there and what he wanted, or what he saw that he shouldn’t have seen, or what he knew of the Fairlight family past that they didn’t want made public, and now he’s dead, if it was the same man, and Lady Clemence is dead too, and I am no further forward than I was the instant I was summoned to view her body!’
I fully understood his frustration and wished that I could offer a glimmer of light on his darkness. ‘I’m sorry, Theo, I—’
But with a shout he suddenly plunged into the litter and drift of papers and documents strewn across his desk. He rummaged for
several moments, muttering under his breath. I made out a succession of curses, each stronger than the one before. Then he said, ‘I’d put it safely away, for it is precious; sacred, perhaps; but then I got it out again to look at and I was interrupted, and it’s here somewhere, it has to be!’
Finally he had what he sought.
His eyes on me, he held it out. ‘There’s this,’ he said.
I took it from him. It was the piece of heavy paper, torn across, that we’d found on the body of the dead vagrant.
I unfolded it, smoothed out the creases and, the shock running through me, stared down at the image drawn upon it.
It was beautiful.
The face was androgynous. Perhaps the artist, depicting an angel, hadn’t wanted to ascribe either male or female sex to a being purely of the spirit. The hair was light, hanging smoothly either side of the face, and indicated by a series of straight lines. The eyes, deep under straight brows, were full of anguish; of sorrow and pain; of fear. The nose sat well-formed and perfectly straight above the mouth, whose full lips looked as if they had been carved. The high cheekbones stood out clearly, hollows angled beneath them. The rip that bisected the paper ran from high on the subject’s right cheek to halfway along the firm chin.
‘I can barely tear my eyes off him,’ Theo said quietly, looking over my shoulder. ‘If indeed it is a he.’
‘I know,’ I agreed. ‘It is utterly compelling.’
‘My daughter said he was sad,’ he went on. ‘She asked if I could make him happy again.’ He paused, then said diffidently, ‘Do you think it’s Christ? The suffering, the deep pain, the compassion?’
‘It’s not Christ,’ I said.
‘How can you know?’ Theo demanded, stung that I had dismissed his suggestion so summarily.
‘This is the preparatory drawing for an angel,’ I said softly. ‘The angel in the glass.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Theo cried. ‘What angel?’
I didn’t know if I should tell him. Jonathan had asked for my help, and I’d known without being told that what we did had to be kept secret. It was dangerous for such things to become common knowledge …
But Theo was trying to find a murderer. The dead vagrant had to be involved somehow with Wrenbeare and he’d been found with this sketch on his body; the sketch that had been used for the violently erotic panel that had been hidden away with Jonathan’s sacred images.
Making up my mind, I handed the sketch back and Theo wrapped it in a piece of plain paper and tucked it away inside his robe, out of sight. I thought he was praying as he did so. Then I said, ‘Come with me. We have to go to Tavy St Luke’s.’
I was too impatient to see the Angel panel again to be circumspect. I said quietly to Jonathan when he came to the door, clearly surprised to see Theo standing beside me, ‘I have to show the Angel to the coroner. I’m sorry, Jonathan, I know you were planning to keep the existence of all six of the panels a secret for a while longer, even if you’ll ever be willing to show the final one to anyone else, but I believe this is very important and I have no choice.’
He had been frowning as I started to speak, but now, apparently accepting the inevitable, he stood aside and Theo and I went in. ‘Go and sit down,’ he said, nodding a greeting to Theo. ‘I will fetch the last panel.’
He was not gone long. He unwrapped the sacking and swept aside the straw padding, and the Angel panel lay on its wrappings under our scrutiny.
‘It’s not medieval, like the others,’ Jonathan murmured.
Theo shot me a look and mouthed, ‘Others?’
I’d forgotten he didn’t know about the St Luke panels, the flowers, the jolly nuns and the lilies of the field. ‘Later,’ I hissed.
‘I’ve been thinking, Gabriel, since last we spoke,’ Jonathan went on, ‘and I believe this can be dated to the later years of Elizabeth’s reign, at a time when, with the danger of destruction by the iconoclasts over at last, some of the old families thought it safe to replace their lost glass. I have come across similar examples, and both the technique and the very vivid colours put me in mind of them.’
‘Yes,’ I said distractedly.
Theo had as yet made no comment. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the beautiful, naked figure, its worshipper kneeling at its feet.
‘Unlike the sketch, the figure in the panel is very definitely male,’ he observed. ‘And he is perfect.’ He reached out a hand and very gently touched the snowy wings. He laughed apologetically. ‘You almost expect them to feel soft. And the face!’ He reached inside his robe for the drawing, unwrapped it and spread it out. ‘The beauty is there, but the angel does not look so sad.’
Jonathan gave a gasp, dropping to the floor and leaning down over the sketch. ‘It is the same man.’
‘The same, yes, but only just a man, wouldn’t you say?’ I replied. ‘Fifteen, sixteen?’
Jonathan was looking from panel to drawing and back again. ‘Yes, perhaps. But who is he?’
‘The drawing was found in the possession of the vagrant believed to have broken into the Fairlight home, Wrenbeare,’ Theo said.
‘Then it’s not – he can’t be Thomas Fairlight, surely?’
I thought quickly, calculating in my head. ‘No. I have no idea what Sir Thomas looked like, but if you’re right about when this panel was made, then he’d have been too old to have been the model. He was born in the 1530s’ – I tried and failed to recall the exact year – ‘and he’d have been almost fifty years old by 1580.’
We fell silent. Such was the power of the angel that it seemed to have robbed us of speech.
But presently Theo gave a soft exclamation. ‘Jarman Hodge told me something he’d heard, although it sounds like no more than some garbled version of an old legend.’
‘Tell us anyway,’ I said.
‘An old woman said there had been an angel that came to earth, and Thomas Fairlight fell down and worshipped it, but then it spread its wings and flew away and he died of a broken heart.’ He shook his head impatiently. ‘It was something of the sort, anyway.’
‘Broken heart,’ I repeated, chilled all at once.
Theo, understanding, said, ‘And somebody took out Lady Clemence’s heart. Broke it, perhaps.’
‘Because, years ago, this man, this boy’ – I indicted the angel – ‘broke Sir Thomas’s?’
‘But it makes no sense!’ Jonathan exclaimed.
Of all the things that we said that night, it was the only inarguably true statement.
SIXTEEN
I slept poorly, my mind far too busy with thoughts and vague ideas that chased each other and never quite caught up sufficiently to make any sense. In the end, as dawn began to pale the eastern sky, I gave up and, drawing on my clothes, went along to my study. With a fresh piece of paper before me and my quill loaded with ink, I began to make a brief account of everything that had happened since I’d been called to see the body of the dead vagrant up on the edge of the moor.
And presently, as so often happens when a logical, step-by-step analysis is made, I was reminded of a little detail that had apparently been forgotten.
The night I went to help Jonathan dig up the panels, Theo had come out to Rosewyke looking for me. When he told me, I’d had the clear impression he was irritated that I hadn’t been there when he needed to talk to me. When I’d enquired what it was about, he’d curtly mentioned a big man who looked like a vagrant, creeping timidly into his office and asking about a missing friend.
But I’d been preoccupied, and thought no more about it. I’d presumed, as far as I’d presumed anything, that Theo would have sent someone out to look for his shy visitor if he thought the man had anything useful to tell him, and if not, would have let him quietly disappear back to wherever he’d come from. And I’d had concerns of my own, first the extraordinary discovery of the panels and then the murder of Lady Clemence.
There had been a name that the big vagrant had mentioned; I clearly recalled Theo telling me we now had a name fo
r the dead man. I scratched around in the deep recesses of my mind and finally came up with it: Jannie.
Did the name go with the body, or was it no more than coincidence that had sent the big man hunting for his missing friend just at the time when a body had been found? I had two options: I could tell myself it was pure chance – there were so many vagrants in the land, too many hopeless, homeless, destitute and sick men and women wandering the roads, the tracks and the out-of-the-way places, and nothing, really, to say that the dead body was that of the big man’s friend – and forget about it. Or I could postulate that there was a connection, explore that possibility and see where it led.
Well, there was nowhere else to go.
Putting my nib to the page, I began to write.
And soon, as my hand began to move faster to keep up with my thoughts, other half-forgotten facts seemed to spring out at me.
The big, dark wolf seen lurking at the foot of the privy wall at Wrenbeare by little Tatty.
The elderly woman who had discovered someone hiding behind her henhouse; someone who had run off with a capful of eggs.
The limp, withered honeysuckle flower that I’d found on the floor beneath the vagrant’s body on its trestle in the crypt of the empty house.
And I thought of that lonely, comfortless ruin of a dwelling up on the fringes of the moor, where the body had been discovered.
Staring blindly out of my window, gradually the realization came that it was now full daylight. For the second day running, I left my house before any of my household was up, and this time I set out for the moors.