Will led the way through a door to the back regions and took us into a further shadowy room. Here, the smell of vomit was stronger still. There was a curtained space at the far end and he pulled the curtain back. Within, was a tumbled bed, and on it, Butterworth was lying. A horrible bucket, the source of the stench, was beside the bed. Butterworth himself lay on his back, his face gaunt and stiff with pain.
‘Visitors from Stonemoor House, Maister,’ said Will.
Butterworth turned his head. There was no heat in the room but his white hair was soaked with sweat. The blue eyes were sunken and beneath the weathering on his skin, he was deathly pale. ‘Sorry, can’t get up,’ he said. ‘Fever … pain. Oh God, so much pain.’
‘Where is the pain?’ Sybil asked briskly, and Butterworth laid a wasted hand over the right-hand side of his stomach. ‘Started all over my belly; now it’s settled here. S’awful. Can’t keep any food down. Nothing helps.’
‘It will before long, I expect,’ said Sybil cheerfully. ‘You have the remedy that Mistress Yates sent?’
‘Yes, course. It did me good before. Not now.’
We stayed for a while. I got Will to put a small brazier in the room, while Sybil and I plied the sick man with Bella’s medicine and gave him a long drink of water. Dale helped me to tidy the bed. Butterworth thanked us but his hollowed eyes and obvious anguish told a grim story. As we were settling him back against his pillows, his fingers, hot and dry, closed round my wrist.
‘Tell Will … get vicar.’
‘The vicar?’
‘I’m done for. Best make my peace,’ said Butterworth.
We said all the right things, ‘you will be better soon’ and ‘keep your heart up’, but he was insistent and so I called to Will, and asked him, in Butterworth’s hearing, to fetch the vicar.
‘Dear Christ,’ said Will, distressed, but he went. We followed him out of the room, though we thought we should remain in the tavern until they came back.
‘He’s going to die,’ Sybil said in a low voice. ‘I’ve seen that malady before. Saw it in a maidservant when I was in Cambridge.’
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘No one knows, but the physician I called, he said he’d seen it several times in the past and he’d never known anyone recover. It’s always fatal.’
We waited until Will returned with the vicar, who turned out to be a small, pink-faced man who stared at us hard and I noticed that despite his round, almost cherubic face, his eyes were like chips of flint. He said: ‘You’re the ladies who are staying in Stonemoor House? Not a good place for honest Christians, in my opinion,’ and then, with Will, went into the tavern.
‘I don’t take to that man,’ said Dale.
‘Well, it’s Butterworth who wants him. We need not stay now that the poor fellow has someone with him again,’ I said.
We turned away and then, unexpectedly, came face to face with a group of villagers, both men and women, who barred our way. We looked at them enquiringly.
‘We’ve seen our Doctor Rowbotham go to our tavern-keeper,’ one of the men said. ‘Saw that Will Grimes brought him. Seems Butterworth thinks he’s not got long to live. Now, why would that be?’
His voice was accusing. ‘We came to see how he did,’ I said carefully. ‘We felt concerned. He was kind to us when we first arrived, in a snowstorm, and we are upset to see him so ill.’
‘As you may well be!’ said one of the women. ‘Wonder how upset that Mistress Yates would be, though.’
‘I don’t understand what you mean by that,’ I said sharply. ‘I am sure that if her remedies fail, she will be very sorry.’
‘Aye. If her remedies fail, sorry’ll be the word,’ said another of the men.
‘Please let us pass,’ I said, and they did so, though with an air of reluctance.
The day was wearing on, and the cold was making itself felt. We made haste up the zigzag hill and were almost glad to find ourselves once more within the walls of Stonemoor. We saw the men reappear soon after, bringing back the final batch of horses, and presently, Brockley came to the guest quarters to join us. It was close to sunset when Will Grimes suddenly arrived in the courtyard, slithering off his scruffy pony and loudly demanding to see Mistress Gould.
We had seen him ride in and gone out to meet him and were startled to see how distraught he looked. The lady who was acting as porteress went in haste to tell Philippa Gould that he was asking for her, and I said: ‘Will! What is it?’
‘Master Butterworth’s dead, that’s what! Died just after vicar’d been with him. I’d thought he were better; he said t’pain was easier, but he didn’t look better, no he didn’t, and then … then … he just passed out and lay there breathing harsh, like, and then t’breathing stopped!’ We saw that Will Grimes was crying. ‘And God alone knows what t’village is going to say to this! They’re saying that Mistress Yates’s potions killed him! Witchcraft, they’re saying. I got to warn her and Mistress Gould! Dear God, here’s the porteress to take me to Mistress Gould. How’ll I find words …!’
The porteress took him away. Walter Cogge came into the courtyard and took charge of the pony. The rest of us trooped back indoors.
‘I knew it,’ said Sybil. ‘I could see it was going to happen. Dead! And now this talk of witchcraft!’ She added, with feeling: ‘The sooner we are miles away from here, the happier I’ll be!’
‘Tomorrow morning,’ I said. ‘If we aren’t caught tonight.’
FOURTEEN
After Dark
When night fell, we retired, though not to our beds. We all remained fully dressed and sat up together in the room that Sybil and I shared. Except for the firelight, we sat in the dark. Brockley advised it.
‘Best not light any candles, madam. Everything ought to look as ordinary as possible. I don’t trust this place.’ He gave me a grim smile. ‘First of all I couldn’t believe there was anything here to fear; now I have my sword at my side even indoors and put my hand on the hilt if a shadow stirs! We shouldn’t show any lights at unusual times. Somebody might be on the prowl, just might catch a glimpse of candlelight through a chink in a shutter and wonder about it. We’ll do best to wait in the dark until we hear the chanting begin. We shouldn’t talk too much, either, and only in low voices if we do. Oh, and I suggest that we should all wear slippers.’
None of us knew exactly when matins would take place. Midnight was the most likely hour but it wasn’t certain. Dale made up the fire but Brockley closed the shutters. I regretted this, for the sky had cleared and there was light from a waxing moon. As our windows faced north and north-west, the moon itself wasn’t visible but I felt that any extra light would be comforting.
Then we sat by the hearth and waited. Maintaining complete silence was scarcely possible, and the dark hours, somehow, create an atmosphere of intimacy. Eventually, I found myself saying: ‘I keep trying to think out what could have happened to Christopher Spelton. He came here, we know that. He was supposed to buy the book. He may have done so – we should know soon whether the book we’ve seen is the real one or not. If it isn’t, then perhaps he did buy it. But then what happened to him, and why?’
‘You are very worried about Master Spelton, are you not?’ Sybil said. ‘You like him, I know. Ursula, did you never actually consider accepting his proposal?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It was kind of him but I don’t want to marry again. I don’t think I can ever again find the depths I found with Hugh, and marriage without them isn’t worth much, or not to me. I don’t think it went very deep with him, you know. I think he was just sorry for me. He was offering me a kindness, a way to share my burdens. In all the years you’ve been with me, why have you never thought of re-marrying, Sybil? I’m sure you could have done.’
‘I’m past the age for such things,’ said Sybil, ‘and besides …’ she paused and then resumed in a voice that was still muted yet shook with the strength of her feelings ‘… even if I were not, I would never, never, never enter into another
marriage, considering what my first one was like. Roland Jester was a brute. He ill-used me to the point that I feared for my life. That’s why I ran away from him. And even at that, there were people, respectable people, who thought I’d done wrong, that a wife should never leave a husband, even if she fears he might murder her. Once the vicar pronounces the words I declare that they be man and wife together the woman is in the man’s power. After I once got away, I promised myself that I would never allow myself to be in any man’s power again!’
‘I can understand that,’ I said, and thought of Queen Elizabeth, my sister, who, I knew, also feared the power of a husband. Her mother and her young stepmother Catherine Howard had both been helpless in King Henry’s power and died for it. I sometimes wondered what, if anything, I felt about King Henry, since he was my father. I had never known him. He was just a name, and my relationship to him was simply a fact, with no emotions attached to it. Yet I knew that my strange way of life might well owe something to abilities inherited from him. Thinking about him had stiffened my courage, more than once.
I hoped it would stiffen my courage now. I said: ‘I can hear chanting.’
‘I have a lantern here,’ Brockley said. ‘I had it in my luggage; one never knows when a light will come in useful. It’s risky to use it for this business but we may not be able to find our way without it. Those passages are probably as black as witches’ cats are supposed to be.’
He stooped to light his lantern from the fire, and then we were ready.
‘Here we go,’ I said. ‘We had better pray for good luck!’
On our noiseless, slippered feet, we made our way out of the bedchamber and down the stairs. The guest-hall windows faced the moon, so the stairs were lit by it, and the windows cast white images of themselves across the floor and the table. We slipped out into the guest-wing vestibule, and then through the door to the main building. The moon was helpful all the way, for here too, the windows were on the southern, moonlit side. Brockley had been wrong to expect Stygian blackness. The big main vestibule was eerie, though, for here, the angle of the moonbeams and the tall, narrow windows made the white shapes across the flagstones resemble the ghosts of elongated people, motionless, stretching out underfoot, while the shadows clustering in the corners were utterly dark and impenetrable. There was a heavy feeling in the air, as though it were full of hidden menace.
From here, the sound of the chanting was not audible, but the silence thrummed in our ears. We stole on, into gallery with the doors upon the right.
‘Which one?’ Sybil breathed.
This was a difficulty that I hadn’t foreseen. Here again, there was moonlight, but the poor windows distorted it, and it is a strange, unreal kind of illumination anyway. It makes familiar things look strange. I had been perfectly sure when we set out that I knew which door was the right one, but now I found myself confused and uncertain. My companions couldn’t decide, either. After we had wasted a few moments muttering about it, none of us able to be definite, I said, ‘Well, we must just guess,’ and with that, I got out my picklocks and made a first attempt. The door I chose, however, wasn’t locked at all and as it opened, the beam of Brockley’s lantern revealed racks of piled sheets. We had found a linen store.
‘Try the next one,’ whispered Sybil.
The next door, also unlocked, was full of spare furniture. The lantern light played over piles of stools, stacked upside down and nesting into each other, half a dozen long benches standing on end and leaning against the wall in a tidy row; a small table standing on a bigger table; an assortment of candlesticks among the small table’s legs.
I closed the door quietly and tried the next one. This was certainly locked. I set to work with the picklocks.
The lock was resistant and as ever on these occasions, I was shaky. It took, I suppose, three or four minutes to get in, although it felt more like three or four hours and beside me, I could hear Sybil’s breath coming short, and was aware that Brockley, playing the lantern beam on the lock to help me, was vibrating with tension. I knew that because the beam wasn’t altogether steady, any more than my hands.
Once the door was open, we all pushed hastily through it and Brockley closed the door behind us. To my alarm, the sound of the chant was no longer to be heard, though the window was not shuttered and the built-out chamber where the service was almost certainly being held was quite close. I stopped short, holding up a hand to keep the others still. Then, to my relief, the chant began again, sounding quite loud. All was well.
All the same: ‘Take care with that lantern, Brockley!’ I breathed and he hurriedly lowered it. I turned back to the door and spent a few moments in locking it from the inside, praying that when it was time to leave, I wouldn’t find it difficult to undo. ‘Where’s the box?’ I said as I put my picklocks away.
‘It was over here, surely.’ Brockley played the lantern along a laden shelf. ‘I think this is it.’
Sybil lifted the box down and put it on the table. I clicked the brass latch back, lifted the lid and took the book out. ‘Here we are. Now. I’ve been doing my best to remember just what Cecil told me, about what the book looks like. He said – I’m sure I’ve got this right – that it was bound in white leather, with the title and the author’s name on the front in gold leaf. And there was a gold-leaf pattern on the front as well, apparently. Hold the lantern nearer, please, Brockley.’
‘Dingy, I call this,’ said Brockley. ‘Even in this light – dingy.’
‘I think you’re right,’ Sybil said, peering. ‘And so were you, Ursula, when you said you didn’t call moon and stars a pattern, either. They’re pictures, not a design. And …’ She wetted a finger and rubbed at the leather cover, staring critically at the result. All three of us did.
‘How can one tell?’ Brockley was fretful. ‘We need daylight for this!’
I looked round and then took the lantern from Brockley. ‘I thought I saw … yes, look. A pile of paper over there, at the end of that lower shelf. White paper, I think. Let’s compare.’
I brought a sheet of the paper over and set it beside the book. And now, even in the difficult lantern light, we could see. The paper was unquestionably white. The leather of the book’s cover was not. Even where Sybil had rubbed it clean, it had hardly changed colour at all. It was yellowish-cream, genuinely, and not just because it was dirty.
‘And,’ I said, pointing, ‘although I can’t make out more than a little of the title, I don’t see how it can say Observations of the Heavens by John of Evesham!’ I ran my finger along the two lines of gold-leaf lettering. ‘I can make out some of the initial letters, they’re big and much clearer than the rest, and there just don’t seem to be any words beginning with O. Or with E. Or H.’
I turned the pages. ‘And from what Cecil said, there ought to be tables of some sort … I can’t find any. There are some diagrams showing planetary movements but no tables with numerals. Cecil also said that where numbers were mentioned, they were in Arabic numerals. There are numbers in the text in places but they’re Roman, not Arabic. And I can’t find anything that looks like a chart of the planets going round the sun. The charts that are here, have all the planets tracing complicated paths. That’s quite different. Planets going round the sun is supposed to be one of the important things in John of Evesham’s book.’
I paused again, turning more pages. ‘I can’t find any disrespectful drawings, either,’ I said. ‘The only drawings are the charts of the planets and the little pictures wrapped round capital letters or in the margins here and there. They’re all quite harmless – mythical birds and beasts, nothing more. This is not the right book. It can’t be. Surely, even if the description did become altered, because of being passed from one person to another, that couldn’t account for all these discrepancies.’
‘It will be interesting,’ said Brockley thoughtfully, ‘to see what Mistress Gould says when we take leave of her tomorrow and offer her a purse of money and wait expectantly for her to hand over John
of Evesham’s Observations.’
Sybil said nervously: ‘The chanting has stopped again. We don’t want to get caught.’
‘Let’s go!’ Dale pleaded.
I put the book into its box and returned the box to its shelf. I was replacing the sheet of paper on its pile when Sybil pulled at my sleeve and when I turned to her, she put a finger to her lips. Holding up the lantern, I saw Brockley standing rigidly, staring towards the door, while Dale’s eyes were wide with fright. Then I heard the approaching footsteps, and the sound of voices.
Quickly, I put the lantern out. We all stood unmoving, hardly breathing. The footsteps had stopped outside the door. Someone – I thought it sounded like Angelica Ames – said, in an argumentative tone: ‘I tell you, I was sure that I heard voices. I said, it was when the chant was interrupted because Sister Annie felt faint – again; I really think she isn’t strong enough for our regime and ought to be excused from attending the night offices. I threw a window open to give her air. My hearing is good and I don’t imagine things. I know I heard voices. And I was half sure I saw a glint of light from the library.’
Another voice, surely that of Mistress Philippa Gould, said: ‘Well, let us see,’ and we heard a key being pushed into the lock from outside.
Brockley moved, grabbed Dale with one hand and me with the other, and elbowed Sybil. We crowded where he dragged us, to a position behind the door, which fortunately opened inwards. Philippa Gould’s voice said: ‘The door is locked as it should be.’
Angelica said something, and Philippa answered: ‘Oh, very well, we’ll make sure that nothing’s amiss,’ and the door opened, pressing us all back into the angle between it and the wall. Jammed together, we held our breath and tried not to stand on each other’s feet. Mistress Gould took just two steps into the room, holding up a candle, and then remarked that the library looked as usual.
The Heretic’s Creed Page 13