He takes a long time to answer. “If there were another reason, a more personal reason, would you allow me to speak to you of it?”
She has heard enough; any more would be tempting fate. “I think that would be unwise.” She puts her hand on the latch, but he covers her hand with his own before she can open the door. She looks at him steadily. “I must go,” she says softly, pulling her hand away. “I must find out if they’ve heard anything from Lucy.” Strathern’s disappointment is evident in his eyes. He opens the door for her, steps out, and helps her down from the coach. His hand holds hers for a moment longer than it should. She pulls away and starts toward the house.
“Mrs. Devlin,” he says suddenly. Hannah turns around. “Will you allow me to call on you again?”
His entreaty is almost impossible to resist, but she has had an entire day to come to her senses. “I do not think we should see each other, Dr. Strathern. But I promise to read through my father’s papers. If I find anything of interest, I will write to you.”
She turns and walks to the door, leaving him standing in the dark, in the rain.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Fifth week of Michaelmas term
DURING HER FREE hours Claire read Shelton’s Tachygraphy online and attempted to decipher her copy of the first fifty pages of the diary. She worked at the dining table in the main room of her set, a few printed pages with the symbols from Shelton’s book spread out before her. At first, the symbols used in the book and in the diary seemed to have little relation to each other, and for a while she worried that Hannah Devlin had devised her own code irrespective of Shelton’s. But gradually, reluctantly, it seemed, the diary divulged its secret language. First Claire searched for the most common words—a, I, and, the, then he, she, they—copying them down in the same location in which they appeared on the page, with great gaps between them for the still-undeciphered words. After a while she began to see the similarities between the diary’s code and Shelton’s, and the sentences formed between the pale blue lines of her notebook.
What she found was nothing less than amazing. The book she’d discovered in the Wren Library was as Robbie Macintosh had said: the journal of a female physician in Charles II’s court. Hannah Devlin’s private observations ranged far beyond medical notes to include her daily activities, her encounters with other people, her private hopes and fears. While not as exhaustive as Pepys, it made for fascinating reading. By the time Andrew Kent stopped by to check on her progress, Claire was transcribing her notes at a slow but steady pace. “It’s amazing,” she told him. “It’s an incredible find.”
“A find that’s been lost, unfortunately,” he replied. “Hoddy and I have gone through most of Derek Goodman’s set without discovering it.”
“Other than not being where he said it would be, the diary is just as Robbie Macintosh said. Hannah Devlin was a doctor. She treated Louise de Keroualle.”
“For what?” He glanced at Claire’s notebook and saw the transcribed date at the top of the page. “Of course: 1672. The king gave her the clap, as it was then called.”
“You know about this?”
“It wasn’t a secret, even then.”
“They tried to keep it a secret, though.” Claire flipped through her transcription to the beginning. “One of the king’s ministers, Lord Arlington, practically kidnaps her and takes her to court. Her father had been a court physician and a friend of Arlington’s, but something happened—I don’t know what, she doesn’t say. She only mentions that her father is dead and that she doesn’t trust Arlington at all.”
“Smart girl. Who was her father? Dr. Devlin?”
“Her maiden name’s Briscoe.”
“Dr. Briscoe,” Andrew mused. “Never heard of him. Is there any mention of Osborne?”
“Not one.”
“Henriette-Anne? Saint-Cloud?”
“Nothing.” Andrew looked disappointed, so Claire tried to cheer him up. “But I’m only up to the eighteenth of November. There’s still a lot left to decipher.”
Andrew asked to read her transcription. She slid her notebook over to him and waited patiently. Near the end, he turned a bit pale and gulped. The amputation, no doubt.
After he finished reading, he stared out the windows at the gray sky beyond. “Robbie Macintosh said that Derek Goodman told him that this diary was the key to Osborne’s murder,” he said, thinking aloud. “I assumed that meant that the author was privy to all of the details, and had written down precisely who murdered Osborne and why. But what if it isn’t that straightforward at all? What if it’s something inadvertent? Incidental, even?”
“You mean that Hannah Devlin herself didn’t know anything about Osborne’s murder?”
“Right.”
“Oh,” she said, dismayed. That would make solving this puzzle considerably more difficult.
Andrew’s expression suddenly brightened. “Have you transcribed the photocopy yet?”
“No. I was so caught up with the diary that I forgot about it.” She found it in the inside pocket of her notebook and set to work. It wasn’t long before she had reproduced the page in fairly legible English.
…she said her name was Jane Constable and she was with child by one of the men at court. Though I told her that I was not the sort of physician who could assist her, I could not help but be moved by her distress. I promised, against my better instincts, to consider providing her with the necessary herbs. Am I wrong to fear that she has been sent to entrap me, to embroil me in a scheme that would be my undoing?
They looked at each other, perplexed. “Still nothing about Osborne,” Claire said. “Maybe you’re right, maybe the solution to the murder isn’t here in the diary. Maybe this is just…a guide.”
“A guide to what?”
“I’m not sure yet. But think of all the books and papers we found in Goodman’s study. The other day, they seemed to have little in common—at least, I couldn’t imagine exactly what it was.” Claire excitedly flipped through her transcription. “But look—there are direct correlations between what’s in this diary and the materials Derek Goodman had in his rooms.”
“So you think this is just a starting point, a nexus for the research.”
“It could be.”
Andrew sighed and studied the floor for a moment. “You want to go back to his set, don’t you?”
Claire nodded eagerly and grabbed her coat.
“So what happened to her?” Claire asked as they hurried along a courtyard path. Even though fellows were allowed to walk on the lawn, she had noticed that they seldom did.
“To who?”
“Louise de Keroualle.”
“You mean because of the, uh—”
“Yes.”
“She survived. For a very long time, in fact. She died in 1734 at the ripe old age of eighty-five, outliving Charles by almost fifty years.”
“That’s it? She was fine?”
“I don’t know if I would say she was fine. She was the king’s mistress for another thirteen years, but she never had another child, and there’s no evidence that she ever conceived again. That episode of illness left her barren. I’d say she paid dearly for being the king’s mistress—but he also paid dearly for his mistake.”
“The necklaces?”
“That was only the beginning. Although Charles’s first mistress, Barbara Villiers, was the most blatantly avaricious of them all, Louise de Keroualle did very well for herself, acquiring jewels, gold, revenues from estates and taxes, houses, land—although she never showed much interest in living anywhere other than at court. She thrived on being at the center of power and being the center of attention.”
Andrew unlocked the door to Derek’s set and they went inside. It was much as they’d left it, with books and papers spread out on the dining room table. If the police had been here again, they hadn’t been much interested in anything there. Although Claire was keen to get back to work, her thoughts were still occupied with Hannah’s story. What a strange a
nd rarified world the court must have been.
“Did she love him?” she asked.
“The king? That’s a question that has long fascinated historians, though no one has ever been able to answer it satisfactorily. Certainly she loved being the king’s mistress, even though she obviously suffered for it. Louise de Keroualle adored comfort and luxury above everything else. But passionate feelings for Charles? If she ever had any, they were never recorded.”
“Did he love her?”
“His true feelings for the mademoiselle, too, are an enigma. Some people believe that his alliance with Louise was political, that she was little more than a French pawn in a game between Charles and Louis. But most think he was blinded by love and quite the fool. Ralph Montagu—the man mentioned in the diary—once famously said that Charles was a fool, and his brother the Duke of York ‘a governable fool.’ It wasn’t an uncommon sentiment at the time. Pepys, Evelyn, the playwrights, the wits—all expressed their disappointment in Charles’s character once the first heady days of the Restoration had passed, and they frequently complained about a king who seemed serious about nothing other than the pursuit of pleasure.”
“Do you think he was a fool?”
“When it concerned women, he certainly was.” Their eyes met, but Andrew quickly looked away, turning his attention to the stacks of books and papers on the table. “Now then. You said there’s something here from the College of Physicians?”
They sorted through the materials on the tabletop until Claire found the document she’d remembered. “It’s the postmortem report on Roger Osborne,” she said. “Performed by Edward Strathern, MD, FRS. What’s FRS stand for?”
“Fellow of the Royal Society.”
Together they read through the report. Osborne died from multiple stab wounds and had been dead for at least two weeks when his body was discovered. Found in the Fleet Ditch by a Mr. T. Ravenscroft, FRS.
“Another fellow,” Andrew commented.
“Is that important?”
“I don’t know. But it makes me wonder where Derek found this document—in the archives of the College of Physicians or the Royal Society? Or somewhere else altogether? It doesn’t have an archival stamp on it. I’m also wondering—”
“There’s more,” Claire interrupted. A couple of the puzzle pieces were beginning to make sense. “More than one.”
“More than one what?”
“More than one murder. The London maps. Perhaps Hoddy pointed them out to you. Derek Goodman wasn’t trying to solve one murder but a whole series of murders.”
The same idea occurred to both of them at the same time, and they rushed to the bedroom to study the maps and the six red dots scattered around London.
“Six murders?” Andrew said skeptically.
“He doesn’t seem sure about the fifth. There’s a question mark next to it.”
“My question is, what do they all have in common?”
“Three of them are near the Fleet,” Claire pointed out.
“You think that’s significant?”
“There’s a lot of material out there on the Fleet River.”
“More than we have time to read,” Andrew concurred. He paused thoughtfully. “I think I know just the person who can help us.”
“Absolutely not,” Fiona Flannigan said. “I wouldn’t lift a finger for that bastard even if you offered me the chance to tap-dance on his grave.”
“But Dr. Flu…Fa…Fla…Fiona,” Andrew sputtered, flustered by her vehemence. “Dr. Goodman is dead.”
“Don’t expect any tears from me,” she said, rather unnecessarily. From the moment Andrew had first mentioned him, Fiona Flannigan had made no effort to hide her virulent hatred of the deceased.
“What I mean, Dr. Flannigan,” Andrew went on, attempting to retrench, “is that you wouldn’t be helping the late Dr. Goodman so much as you would be helping us. We simply want to know if you know anything about a few murders. In London. In the 1670s. Near the Fleet.”
She folded her arms over her chest and raised her pointy chin, regarding them suspiciously through narrowed eyes. Fiona Flannigan was a petite woman, but formidable. Her incredibly well-defined biceps and triceps bulged from the short sleeves of her black cycling shirt, which was made of some kind of high-tech fabric that reminded Claire of a diver’s wet suit. Her short red hair stuck out from her head in a puckish arrangement of moussed spikes, a style that seemed rather revealing of her personality, which Claire would have readily described as thorny.
The walls of Fiona’s Clare College office were plastered with copies of old diagrams, drawings, and plans of various pumps, pipelines, gutters, sewers, canals, and a number of mechanisms Claire couldn’t even begin to name, all clearly connected with the book she was writing. An important work, Andrew had told her on the walk over. Derek had been wrong to make fun of it. Clearly Fiona hadn’t forgiven him, and possibly never would. Just by saying his name they’d aligned themselves with the enemy, not a smart move. If they didn’t rectify it soon, it was unlikely Fiona was going to tell them anything helpful. She looked as though she was ready to kick them out of her office. Andrew might not have noticed the fury in her eyes, but Claire certainly did.
“Dr. Flannigan,” she said sweetly, “this drawing is very intriguing.” She pointed at a nearby diagram of what looked like a canal. “Part of your research?”
Andrew shot her a look, but she ignored him and continued to smile encouragingly at Fiona. She knew as well as anyone that historians liked nothing better than to discuss their work. How many people ever bothered to ask? And, truth be told, she was sincerely interested.
“That,” Dr. Flannigan replied, “is the first large-scale system of municipal waste disposal ever invented. It was conceived and designed by Theophilus Ravenscroft, one of the unsung geniuses of his time.” She spoke with pride and some lingering hesitation, as if she feared ridicule. No doubt she’d had plenty of that from Derek Goodman.
“How did it work exactly?”
“See here—” She moved closer to Claire and pointed at the relevant parts of the diagram. “These movable gates filter the waste from the river. It’s then put on barges and taken downstream.”
“Ingenious.”
“Yes, it was.” Fiona Flannigan looked at them with a gleam of triumph in her eyes. “All the more so for being the first. Until this, no one in London—not even Wren or Hooke—had thought of a method to rid the city of the sewage that accumulated every day.” She spoke more pointedly to Claire. “Do you have any idea of the sort of filth that people lived amongst then?”
“A bit,” Claire ventured.
“It was worse than you can possibly imagine. People were surrounded by rubbish and their own effluvia. And dying from it, of course, although they didn’t know it. It’s difficult to conceive of what it was really like, mainly because most of us have only been exposed to a sanitized, Hollywood version of the past. But back in the seventeenth century, town-house basements were used as cesspits, and night soil men carried the unpleasant cargo right through the house. People thought nothing of throwing the contents of a chamber pot out the front window and into the street.”
“Did Mr. Ravenscroft’s device work?”
Fiona stepped back, the sharp features of her face tightening with distrust. “That’s not really the point, is it?”
“Didn’t Ravenscroft end up in the Tower?” Andrew mused. “Didn’t something go terribly wrong—”
“Ravenscroft was a genius,” Fiona insisted. “And I could prove it too if Derek Goodman hadn’t absconded with my research materials.”
“What do you mean, absconded?”
“What I mean is that too many times when I tried to locate the books or documents I needed, they seemed to have mysteriously disappeared. And Derek Goodman always seemed to have been the person looking at them just before me.”
“I see,” Andrew said. “I might be able to help with that. Fiona, if I can find the materials you want, would you shar
e with us what you know about any murders committed near the Fleet Ditch? It may have something to do with Derek Goodman’s death.”
She thought it over, then smiled. “I’ll do you one better,” she said. “I’ll tell you the name of the student he was sleeping with.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
HER NAME WAS Ashley Templeton and she was a third-year at Trinity. Fiona had seen her with Derek Goodman in the London Underground only two weeks ago, on the Piccadilly line. They hadn’t seen her. How could they? They’d been in constant lip-lock all the way from Knightsbridge to Leicester Square.
As Claire and Andrew crossed West Road after leaving Fiona’s office, Andrew was still shaking his head. “A student,” he muttered angrily. “The man clearly had no moral compass whatsoever. If he were still alive I’d be tempted to kill him myself.” He stopped and looked tiredly at Claire. He seemed to have aged a few years since the morning. “I’m going to have to talk to her. But what am I going to say? Pardon me, but did you have a sexual relationship with Derek Goodman?”
“You can’t just blurt it out like that.”
“I know, but I can’t think of anything else.”
“The point is to encourage her to talk, not frighten her into being defensive. Why not ask her if she knows anything about what happened that night? Even the smallest detail could help us discover who killed him.”
“Help them, you mean.” He looked at her sternly. “The police.”
“Them, of course,” Claire nodded.
They watched a punt filled with Japanese tourists float slowly along the river past Queens’ College. Andrew sighed. “Do you mind coming with me? I don’t imagine I’ll be very good at this.”
She was surprised that he’d taken her comment so much to heart. “But I don’t even know her.”
He shrugged. “I hardly know her myself.”
They found Ashley Templeton’s set at the top of C staircase in Whewell Court. As soon as the girl opened the door, Claire realized that she’d already made a whole group of assumptions that weren’t going to apply at all. She’d constructed a mental image of an innocent, duped school-girl, another of Derek Goodman’s victims. Or, if victim was too strong a word, someone who had been taken in by his mesmerizing charm; something to which Claire could sadly relate.
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