“The treaty was signed at Dover, and Charles and his little sister bade a tearful farewell. Only a few weeks later, Henriette-Anne was back at Saint-Cloud in Paris when she suffered excruciating stomach pains and suddenly died. There were rumors of poison, which later proved to be unfounded. Apparently she died from the perforation of a peptic ulcer. Her last hours were reportedly quite gruesome.”
“But what does all this have to do with the death of Roger Osborne?”
“Osborne had been part of the English contingent at Dover. When Henriette-Anne returned to Paris, he was one of a handful of English courtiers who accompanied her. No one knows precisely why. Right before she died, Henriette-Anne entrusted Osborne with a gold ring and a secret.”
“What secret?”
“No one knows. But it’s long been speculated that a connection exists between that night at Saint-Cloud and his murder in London two years later.”
Exactly how a diary written by an English doctor could provide insight into a centuries-old mystery was not at all clear, but Claire knew from past experience that a careful reading of documents such as these could reveal secrets long obscured. It had certainly been true in Venice, where she and Andrew had found that Alessandra Rossetti’s letters to her cousin contained secret, coded messages. Claire felt a tingle of excitement at the possibility of a new discovery. That the diary was written by a female doctor—that’s if Robbie Macintosh’s memory was accurate—was an additional source of interest. Female physicians had been uncommon in the late seventeenth century, but not unheard of. Claire had read of female practitioners of all sorts: midwives, tooth-pullers, bone-setters, apothecaries, surgeons. But a female physician who’d ministered to the king’s mistress? That was promising, indeed. But how could they be certain that Robbie Macintosh was telling the truth? He’d seemed awfully nervous about something.
“Didn’t you think that Robbie Macintosh was acting strangely?” Claire asked Andrew as they passed through St. John’s Chapel Court and headed toward Magdalene Street.
“Robbie? Why, no, not at all.”
“I thought he seemed anxious. Upset, even.”
“Of course he was upset. He’d just found out that his supervisor died.”
“It seemed as if he was reacting to something more than that. As if—”
Andrew skewered Claire with a skeptical look. “Are you going to suspect everyone you meet from now on of being a murderer?”
“Of course not. But you can’t deny that he was acting strange.”
“How would you know?”
“Because I saw him. I observed him.”
“But you’ve never met him before.”
“So?”
“So you have nothing with which to compare his behavior.”
“What difference does that make?”
“It makes a great deal of difference, I should think. How can you know if someone is acting oddly if you don’t know how they act normally?”
“It isn’t necessary to have a baseline of normal behavior to judge aberrant behavior against. Odd is simply odd—anyone can see it. Or, at least, most people can see it, if they’re paying attention.”
“What exactly do you mean by that?”
“You don’t always pick up on the subtleties, do you?”
“Are you trying to insult me, or are you just doing it inadvertently?”
“I wasn’t trying to insult you. I’m just saying that you don’t always seem to—”
“Notice the nuances of human behavior?” He made a harrumphing sound as he walked under the archway marked with the inscription BIBLIOTECA PEYPSIANA 1724, commemorating the date the library was installed. “Yes, I’m sure that’s a wonderfully attractive quality,” he said grumpily as he stomped up the stairs ahead of her.
“Of course I’ve heard about Dr. Goodman. I’m terribly sorry.” Nora Giles, the Pepys librarian, had risen from her desk and walked across the gleaming wood floor to greet them, the tap of her high heels echoing in the otherwise silent room. She was in her late twenties, of partial African descent, with a posh accent that placed her in England’s upper crust. She was stunningly attractive, with flawless coffee-and-cream skin and shining black hair that she wore in short, bouncy curls. Her shapely figure strained against her businesslike silk blouse and tight pencil skirt. She was rather glamorous for a librarian. No, Claire corrected herself, Nora Giles was rather glamorous, period. She looked as if she’d be more at home singing jazz standards in a nightclub than babysitting a bunch of old books.
“Had you seen Dr. Goodman recently, by any chance?” Andrew asked. He seemed unaffected by the librarian’s potent appeal. Perhaps this quirk of not noticing everything was a positive quality, in the long run.
She took her time answering such a simple inquiry, and a seemingly innocuous one. “Yes,” Nora finally said, “in fact I did see him just a few days ago.” As she spoke, she twisted the engagement ring that graced her well-manicured hand. Perhaps it wasn’t nervous tension, however, but simple discomfort. The ring was rather large, after all, with a center diamond approximately the size of a Mini Cooper. Poor thing, Claire sympathized. Beastly ring probably got in the way when she was trying to shelve books and so forth. “Dr. Goodman was researching seventeenth-century speed-writing and stopped by to ask a few questions,” Nora added. The cherry red gloss on her full lips glistened seductively in the warm light from a brass chandelier.
Andrew’s eyebrows hiked up. “Really?” Claire had heard that tone before, one that managed to insinuate disbelief without coming right out and calling someone a liar. But why was he using it with Nora Giles? Why was he suddenly so suspicious?
“Yes,” Nora answered. “He was writing a paper for one of the journals.” She seemed more confident now, as if she was on more familiar territory.
“Coincidentally,” Andrew said, “we’re also here to pick your brain about the sort of code Pepys used in his diary. But this is Dr. Donovan’s first time here. Perhaps we could…?”
“Of course,” Nora replied smoothly, then offered to take them on a quick tour. They followed her to the room where the collection was kept in tall glass-fronted oak bookcases, specially designed by the diarist to accommodate his three-thousand-volume library. The books were arranged, rather unusually, from the smallest to the largest.
An alumnus of Magdalene College, Samuel Pepys had bequeathed his library to his alma mater at his death. “His six-volume diary was part of the collection,” Nora explained, “but no one knew of its existence. Although he wrote in his diary nearly every day for nine years, he kept it a secret even from his wife and his closest friends. So here they languished until John Evelyn’s diaries were successfully published in 1818. The then master of Magdalene decided that Pepys’s diaries should be transcribed, so he hired John Smith, a poor, struggling undergraduate, to do it. It took Smith three years, working almost every day. When he finally completed the project in 1822, the three thousand diary pages added up to over nine thousand pages of handwritten text—and, of course, one of the most complete and personal accounts of the Restoration era.
“The sad and ironic footnote to this story is that John Smith never knew that the key to the ‘code’ was here in the library all the time. It’s not really a code per se, but a form of shorthand made popular by a man named Thomas Shelton. The book that Pepys used as a guide is right here.”
She crossed to one of the bookcases and opened the glass front, taking out a copy of Thomas Shelton’s Tachygraphy, The most exact & compendious method of short and swift writing that hath ever yet been published by any. Pepys’s binder had bound it in brown calf and stamped Pepys’s coat of arms on the front.
“Any chance we could borrow this?” Andrew asked.
Nora laughed. “You should know better, Dr. Kent. Sorry, but no.”
Andrew took the photocopied diary page from his coat pocket and opened it for her. “Can you decipher this?”
Nora studied it for a moment. “Not right away, no. It lo
oks like tachygraphy, but it’s not exactly like Pepys or Shelton,” she said.
“Then what is it?” Claire asked.
“A personal cipher, based on Shelton’s system. His method was often used as a prototype, but people tended to develop their own code—their own way of speedwriting unique to themselves. In addition, as I’m sure you know, Dr. Kent, in the seventeenth century there was no such thing as a dictionary or standardized spelling. People wrote words phonetically, and they often wrote the same word in a variety of ways.”
“So it’s like translating another language,” Claire said.
“It can be daunting, but it’s not quite that bad. It is English, after all. If you really want to try to decipher this, I’d suggest reading Shelton’s book. Although I can’t loan you our copy, the text is easy enough to acquire. Not only is Tachygraphy available online but so are a few other seventeenth-century books on speedwriting. Early English Books Online it’s called. You’ll have access through the university.”
Chapter Thirty-four
9 December 1672
HANNAH SLIPS INTO a pew at the back of the church as the choir begins the Introit. St. Clement Danes is old, cramped, and dark, with the clammy air of a root cellar and a whiff of putrescence no amount of burning herbs can eradicate. Beneath the buckling stone floors the parish dead are buried one on top of the other. The broken flagstones are most noticeable near the altar, the most sought-after spot for the departed. Although the church filled up long ago, a few extra shillings to the sexton will ensure that old bones are dug up to make room for the new. Hannah’s own people—father, husband, daughter—rest in the churchyard near the south wall.
Although the service has just begun and it is not yet time to pray, Hannah quietly sinks to her knees. Her patellae fit into worn hollows made by hundreds of other knees on hundreds of other Sundays. Only a few others have sought out St. Clement’s dim sanctuary this morning; they look too lost in their own supplications to make note of hers. She bows her head and lowers her eyes. The voices of the choir rise, their somber Latin harmonies resonating off the moldy stone. Thou shall purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean. The guttering candles nod, her closed prayer book hums in her hands.
She soundlessly recites the words of the fifty-first psalm along with the choir without any expectation of an answer. The event that she related to Dr. Strathern was singular; she is no Joan of Arc. Hannah has never even considered herself particularly devout. It’s been a long time since she’s entreated God for anything. In recent months she has avoided church, using her patients or the care of her mother as an excuse.
Thou shall wash me and I shall be clean as snow. Was it possible to be redeemed? To be a better person, to be wiser, kinder, more compassionate? To be the sort of doctor who could have saved her husband, her child, perhaps even her father? It is no wonder she has avoided coming here, and the weekly reminder of her failure. Failure to be the sort of physician she set out to be, not the one she is becoming, who waits on the king’s mistress and brushes up on recipes that make a woman’s skin white and soft.
When she collapsed at the dance the other night, Dr. Strathern caught her and carried her from the floor. That much she was able to deduce, although everything after that was confused, unclear. She remembers opening her eyes while she lay on the floor of the Great Hall, seeing Montagu, Lucy, and Hester hovering over her. She remembers vaguely some terse words exchanged between Strathern and Montagu, remembers brief snatches of the ride home interspersed with moments of blackness, as if she was drifting in and out of consciousness. She recalls that the atmosphere in the carriage was tense, but whether it was from Lucy’s and Hester’s worry about her or from their disappointment at leaving the dance early she could not say; perhaps it was both. She spent the next day in bed with a pounding head and a tremulous stomach, turning away the girls and even Mrs. Wills when she knocked on her door. Montagu sent a note inquiring after her health, which she was unable to answer. The next day, when she was feeling human again, a second letter arrived, telling her that he must go abroad immediately and would be away for some time. He didn’t mention how long.
Last night she read over Montagu’s last letter, as if it might divulge some secret about him, about who he was or how he felt about her. About his intentions, she supposed, but she could not solve that puzzle with this missive, which was tender without being overtly romantic. My dearest Mrs. Devlin, it began, It is painful for me to relate the following, for it puts such distance between us… That he wrote to her in the first place must mean something; but what, exactly? That he expected her to notice his absence and to long for his return? Or that he felt such longing himself? From their first meeting they had a natural affinity; on the night of the dance their rapport took on new depth. She thought about the way he looked at her, the way he held her while they were dancing, the many compliments and courtesies he paid her. Until the night of the dance, she would have said that she favored no one more than Montagu, and she would have guessed that he favored no one more than she. And then she ruined it all by her embarrassing display. Though she doesn’t want to admit it, Dr. Strathern’s comments worry her. She knows better than to listen to court gossip—it’s meant to slander. She doesn’t really believe what he said about Montagu, but she can’t help wondering if just a bit of it might be true.
Her night was troubled by vivid, disturbing dreams. Memories from the night of the dance intertwined with fantasies and visions, things that never were and never could be. Montagu holding her hand and smiling seductively; that was real. As was her memory of Mademoiselle de Keroualle making a perfect curtsy to the king, all the while gazing up at him adoringly; or Lucy and Hester, their faces aglow, watching the dance from the balcony. But along with the authentic recollections were unsettling visions: the courtiers’ powdered, rouged faces turned grotesque as they spoke and ate and laughed. The queen busily knitted a black and white checkered counterpane that flowed from her lap and metamorphosed into the dance floor. Arlington and Madame Severin loomed overhead, as big as giants, moving the courtiers about like chess pieces. The king winked at her. “It’ll be our secret,” he said, but when she demanded to know what the secret was, he refused to tell her. Lucy and Hester stood in a garden, arguing vehemently. Madame Severin offered Hannah a glass of wine. She accepted it, but when she looked into the glass, she felt ill. Jane Constable danced with the Duke of York. After a few turns on the floor, the duke was no longer a man but a squalling baby struggling in the girl’s arms. Dr. Strathern held a severed foot in his hand. He kept trying to tell her something, but she could not hear him over the sound of the courtiers’ laughter.
Edward. She permits herself to say his name. Softly, so that no one else can hear, except God. She went to sleep thinking of one man and awoke thinking of another. All night, her dreams kept returning to Edward Strathern. At first, she envisioned him as he was the night of the dance. Then she recalled every moment she had spent with him—in the tack room, the anatomy theatre, the Great Hall—in dreams that offered an unending kaleidoscopic vision of his face, witnessed in every mood and every light. When she woke, she was on fire with the thought of him, almost as if he had been lying with her. And she realized what she had been avoiding most of all, the feeling that had started the first time she’d looked into his eyes and seen that he was the one person from whom she could not hide, from whom she did not want to hide.
But he is to be wed to another, to a woman who is most likely a better match for him. She remembers the two of them dancing together: both tall and elegant, a seemingly perfect couple. From Strathern’s own admission, it’s a match based on affection. She does not want to covet another woman’s man; she does not want to think of him at all.
Make me a clean spirit, O God: and renew a right spirit within me. She nestles her prayer book in the folds of her skirt, clasps her hands together, bows her head, and prays fervently to rid herself of her preference.
Walking home, she stays close to the buildin
gs, her cloak wrapped tight. The storm that passed during the night is long spent, but the day remains blustery. Wind blows rainwater off the rooftops, whips in moaning, keening fury through the narrow alleys.
She turns into Portsmouth Street to find a private coach parked outside her door. Two roans paw the ground, steamy breath rising from their flared nostrils. The coachman jumps down from his seat to gentle them. When she gets closer, she sees the man who has come to call.
Dr. Strathern stands back from the front door, gazing up at the windows as if expecting someone to appear. She stops, feeling the blood rushing to her face; whether it’s from panic, shame, or elation she isn’t entirely sure. She has just asked God to help her forget him, and now he is here. Is it a test? Did she mouth the words without meaning them? In her heart, what exactly did she pray for?
Her first impulse is to turn and walk away, but by the time she is close enough to recognize him he has seen her too. There is nothing for her to do but to continue forward, as if his appearance at her house on a Sunday morning is not unusual. She worries that her thoughts, her dreams, her desires are achingly obvious in her face, and she gives a brief thanks that people cannot read minds; for she would blush furiously if he could read hers. But Dr. Strathern gives no indication that his visit is anything other than congenial in nature, and so she decides to welcome him in the same spirit.
The doctor is attired somewhat carelessly for the Lord’s Day in a wrinkled wool coat. No wig, just his own shoulder-length hair tied back with a simple ribbon, a few strands breaking free in the gusty winds. The natural hue of his hair is slightly lighter than the wig she has seen him wear, its true color the warm brown of roasted hazelnuts with some early streaks of gray at the temples. She likes the gray, likes the unshaved stubble darkening his cheeks and chin and upper lip. She thinks back to how he looked the night of the dance, the velvet coat and the snowy cravat, his clean hands, his smooth face, how flawless he appeared. Even so, she decides she prefers him like this, mussed and a bit rough. It feels intimate, almost too intimate, both of them still creased with sleep.
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