Mask of Night

by Philip Gooden

  We must talk in private.

  I could ignore the request. We’d be departing from Oxford in forty-eight hours or less.

  Caution counselled, well, caution. What did this have to do with me?

  But curiosity said something different. To leave the town without having got to the bottom of this mystery would be like quitting a play before the fifth act. You stick it out even though you know it’s going to end unhappily.

  So early next morning, after breakfasting on a little ale and brown bread, I slipped out of the Golden Cross and made my way to Cats Street. It wasn’t far, just a few hundred yards down the High Street and to the east of St Mary’s, the church with the great spire. The mist from the river was lifting but shreds of it still hung in the air. The highways were almost deserted.

  I had the note in my pocket. The house on the corner. This must be it. A quite handsome dwelling on two floors, half facing on to the High and half on to Cats Street, which was more of a lane. It was a large place for one woman, though Angelica Root may have had dependants or lodgers for all I knew. Certainly large for a nurse, but then I recalled that she’d been married at least three times. Perhaps the late Mr Root had left her well provided for.

  I knocked at the door, expecting to be expected. Waited. No one came. Knocked again. I pushed at the door but it was shut fast. I turned to go away, half relieved.

  Then I saw that one of the casement windows on the side of the house which faced Cats Street was ajar, more than slightly ajar. I peered into the room, which was unoccupied apart from a dining-table, a few chairs and some decorative odds-and-ends. If you’re a town-dweller it is not wise to leave a window unlatched during the night for obvious reasons, and if you live in the country then you probably believe that the night air is bad for your health. So I concluded that there was someone in the house, or that there had been someone here earlier this morning.

  I returned to the front door and rapped on it once more.

  When no answer came, I walked back down the lane and stood in front of the open window.

  Before I was properly conscious of what I was doing, I had swung the window right open and hoisted myself over the sill and into the dining-room. Getting in was not difficult. The sill of the window was only three feet or so from the ground.

  Once inside the house I paused. I wondered whether anyone had seen me climbing in. So impulsive had the action been that I hadn’t even bothered to check. I closed the window.

  I called out Mistress Root’s name. The boards creaked as I made my way across a dark lobby and towards a room on the far side. The curtains were drawn but some light squeezed through a gap. In one corner was an ample bed, the marital bed I assumed. Mistress Root was lying on the bed under the shadow of the tester overhead. She was fully clothed, in the same rather gaudy robes she’d been wearing at the Ferns’ last night.

  I called out her name, more softly this time. But I knew that she was dead. Even by the meagre light I could see her staring eyes, like currants popping out of a cake. She was still red in the face, but blotchily so. On the bed beside her lay two figures, simple clay things that a child might play with, miniature humans. I picked them up, for want of anything else to do. They had featureless heads and gestures for limbs. They seemed familiar, and I remembered Susan Constant’s description (now retracted) of a figure left outside a back door. One of these images had a pin stuck into its belly while the other had a pin jammed into its head.

  I felt hot, then cold. I don’t know how long I stood there in the house of a dead woman, before I was brought back to myself by the squeaking of cart wheels from the lane outside. The mind is odd, because I remember thinking to myself that the carter needed to grease his axle. The squeaking stopped. There was the sound of a key scraping in the front door, then the creak of the door opening and a gust of cold air. There was a little hanging moment, when time seemed to stop altogether. Then a whispering and the soft click of the door being closed again. Too soft a sound, too surreptitious.

  In such moments instinct takes over. Thank God it takes over. And thank God too that Mistress Root was a woman who’d come up in the world or married well or been left comfortably off. Whatever the reason, she was the (dead) occupant of a fine bed, elaborately carved with recesses for candles in the headboard and with solid plinths supporting the pillars which held up the tester. But what mattered to me at that moment wasn’t the carving or the embroidery but the space underneath the bed.

  Before I was really aware of what I’d done I found myself beneath the bed, burrowing like a frightened rabbit pursued by dogs. It was dark and dusty down here. I waited. The top of my head grazed against the leather webbing which supported the feather mattress and the wool blankets (no fustian for Mrs Root) and their late owner. However terrible the circumstances, there was something almost comforting in all this weight above me, particularly when I heard the floorboards creaking right outside the room.

  “There’s nothing to see,” said a muffled voice.

  The light was poor but, for myself, I could see quite enough. There were two of them. I’d been saved by the fact that before they reached the bedroom they had gone into at least one of the other rooms on this floor. I’d also heard feet mounting the stairs and, after a few moments, coming down again. If they’d headed straight for this room I would not have had time to get lodged out of sight beneath the bed.

  But now the four feet advanced towards my hiding-place and I breathed slow. Not just feet. Also in my line of sight were the bottom of their dark cloaks and a pair of pale sticks, too thin and whip-like to be aids to walking. The feet stopped. Then came the same muffled voice.

  “Naughty man’s cherries,” it said.

  Naughty man’s cherries?

  At least that’s what it sounded like. And there was something familiar about the voice which had uttered these words, although I couldn’t place it. This peculiar remark was followed by a giggle.

  The other person made an impatient, shushing sound.

  The feet positioned themselves wide apart and there was a grunting and heaving from above. The two intruders pulled the body of Mistress Root off the bed, none too gently or respectfully. It landed with a thump on the floor. Shadowy figures bent down and half carried, half dragged the body from the bedroom.

  I caught a glimpse of the pair as they reached for the corpse. Only a glimpse but it was enough to confirm that they were the hooded, beaked figures I’d seen on two other occasions in this town. The white sticks or wands were the insect-like horns they carried. Seeing them, I was frightened, even more frightened than before, but somehow not surprised by the sight.

  As they moved the woman’s body one of her shoes fell off. If either of the men noticed, neither came back to retrieve it. There was a slithering and thumping from the lobby before the house door opened and closed with a bolder sound than previously. I waited, expecting to hear the creaking of the cart. But no sound came. I concentrated on a feather which was hanging down from the mattress in front of my face. It quivered with my breath. The door to the bedroom was still open. The stretch of floor between where I was lying and the way out seemed as big as a ploughed field. In the middle of the floor Mistress Root’s shoe lay abandoned.

  Eventually I heard the cart departing. I counted to a hundred, and then to another hundred for safety’s sake. I eased myself out from under the bed. I was covered in dust and feathery stuff. I brushed myself down, taking longer over it than was perhaps necessary. I picked up Mistress Root’s shoe and placed it carefully on the bed. It was a smart chopin, with a raised sole to keep the wearer out of the mud or, in Mistress Root’s case, to give her an extra inch or so in conversation. I felt a sudden jolt of anger. She might have been a formidable creature, but what had she done to deserve to die? There was a hollow where her body had lain. The two images, run through with pins, had been left behind by the hooded figures.

  There was nothing more to be done here. I went into the dark lobby and tried to open the front door
but it was locked. The “visitors” had arrived with a key and they had evidently departed with it too. So I passed into the dining-room, paused and looked around for a moment before moving on to the casement by which I’d made my illicit entrance in the first place. Once again I opened the window. This time I checked in each direction. My luck was holding. Cats Street was empty. I swung myself over the sill and hopped out into the lane, then strode off towards the High.

  Or rather I made to stride off but my attention was immediately caught by the front door. A cross had been daubed in red on it. The paint was fresh and glistened slightly. Even as I watched, a streak ran down like blood from a wound. It was a careless job. I don’t suppose that Alderman Farnaby back in Southwark would have approved, it would not have fitted his feet-and-inches specifications. But the cross did its job of warning off any curious neighbours or passers-by from this solid house in Cats Street, since it announced that the place was sealed up on account of the plague indoors. This explained the pause between the departure of the hooded men from the house and the noise of the cart retreating. One of them had been employed in daubing this crude sign on Mistress Root’s door while the other had no doubt been loading the body on to the cart. I wondered what had happened to the third man, since I’d definitely seen three of them on my first night in Oxford.

  My heart beating very fast now, I walked down the High. It was still relatively early on this cold spring morning, but a few more people were about. There were half a dozen carts trundling by in both directions, ordinary conveyances loaded with ordinary goods and driven by ordinary folk. No hooded individuals with a corpse for luggage. They would have been rather noticeable, after all. They would surely have wished to avoid being noticeable. I assumed therefore that these anonymous beings had not driven off in this direction.

  I needed to get away somewhere, and think about what I’d just witnessed.

  It took me only a few minutes of threading through back streets and alleys to gain the isolation of the meadows by Christ Church where I’d walked with Susan Constant several days before. Then we’d talked of her suspicions that her cousin was being poisoned and of hooded figures and of images stuck through with pins. She’d retracted everything that she’d said, but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t true. I could testify to the truth of at least two of these items.

  Scarcely aware of the rushing water at my side, I walked furiously by the river bank, trying to order my own headlong thoughts.

  First of all, there was the distress of discovering Angelica Root. A little debt of grief and silence was owing to her, even from one who had scarcely known her.

  Close on the heels of this distress, very close, was the fear that I had been left vulnerable to the plague by being inside the same house, the same room, as the late Mistress Root. This fear – more properly, this terror – would have been enough to make some men run wild through the streets, tearing off their garments and throwing themselves on their knees with supplications to the Almighty for deliverance. With others, it might have driven them not to frenzy but to a final debauch. And others still would simply have curled up and waited to die.

  I dare say I would have reacted in one of these ways, if I’d genuinely thought that I had been exposed to a plague victim. But, however Angelica Root had met her end, I did not believe that she had fallen under the scythe of King Pest.

  For one thing, judging by my brief view of her while she lay on the great bed, she did not show the tokens, the swellings and buboes. For another, if she had been surprised by the infection, then it had been a sudden attack, remarkably sudden. Why, I had seen Mistress Root laughing her head off at the bawdiness of Thomas Pope as he played the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet scarcely more than twelve hours earlier. No sign of anything amiss there. I am no physician but, like everyone, I know that one of the worst aspects of the pestilence is its tendency to toy with its victims, to stretch them out on the rack of suffering rather than ending their lives with one certain stroke. So if Mistress Root had succumbed to the plague and died in less than a single circuit of the clock then she had been – in one sense – a lucky woman.

  No, although I didn’t know what had happened to her, I did not think that this was the cause of her death.

  Leaving aside the question of how she died, I grubbed around on the edges of the business, trying to pick up a few conclusions.

  To start with something small.

  Like the two clay images, transfixed by pins. These were similar to the one described by Susan Constant as having been left outside her family’s house, apparently directed at her cousin. Too similar for coincidence. Did the presence of these figures on Mistress Root’s bed point to a connection between the nurse and her one-time charge? It was Abel Glaze who’d suggested that the old woman might have been so hostile to the notion of marriage that she’d resorted to extreme means to keep Sarah away from it. A ridiculous idea, but even ridiculous ideas turn out to be true sometimes . . .

  Then there was the question of those shoes.

  (This was the second time within a few days that I’d stopped to consider a dead person’s shoes. I recalled the strange business of Hugh Fern’s changing his footwear twice, before his appearance on the stage of the Golden Cross Inn and then once more before his death.)

  The chopin discarded in the bedroom in Cats Street was for wearing outdoors, unlike the pumps or slippers which you might have expected a woman to put on when she enters her own house, for comfort’s sake or to keep the mud and muck from her floors. The fact that Mistress Root was still wearing her street shoes when I found her could suggest that she’d died not long after returning home the previous night. Perhaps the hooded figures were lying in wait for her outside. That would explain how they’d obtained a key to the house.

  This chain of reasoning wasn’t very strong but it tended to reinforce the notion that, whatever the cause of death, it wasn’t the plague. A doctor might have been able to tell – had any doctor been permitted to examine her, to anatomize her – but the unfortunate woman would already be on her way to a burial-pit, a place somewhere on the edge of the city well away from the most populous areas and set aside for plague victims.

  For Angelica Root had been presented as a victim of the plague. That was the clear message of the red cross on her door. It was the only explanation for the presence of the hooded figures, whose garb – I now realized – might have been protective. I had never seen such garments before but they could have been put on for a practical purpose, as well as for the purpose of instilling fear. This pretence of the plague would account too for the way in which they’d been able to remove her body with relative boldness in broad daylight and from a house adjoining the busiest thoroughfare in the town.

  The assumption I’d made earlier about hooded figures carting off corpses and their need to avoid being noticed was wrong. It didn’t matter if they were noticed.

  They were not worried about being stopped and interrogated on the contents of their cart, because anyone seeing them would do nothing but avert his eyes and say a prayer under his breath, perhaps crossing himself. Not a person would think of intercepting a plague-cart in a town where the disease was beginning to take hold. Nobody would question these drivers, however outlandish their costumes.

  They could get away with murder.

  The murder of Mistress Root, for example.

  That Mistress Root had been murdered was not a completely implausible speculation. She wasn’t exactly a harmless old woman. I wouldn’t have liked to be on the receiving end of her meaty fists. However, it was not her prowess in a fight but the secrets she kept which made her dangerous. More particularly, she had summoned me to a meeting to pass those secrets on, maybe. The note was still in my pocket. By the fast-flowing Isis I took it out and, although I knew the words by heart, re-examined the wrinkled paper as if it might yield more information.

  You are right to suspect foul play in the death of Hugh Fern. We must talk in private.

  Here was suffici
ent reason for her death, surely. But what had she been going to tell me? And why me? Because I was the only one to be suspicious over Fern’s death? How had she discovered my suspicions?

  A sudden idea flew into my head. Not a welcome one.

  How could I be sure that the note had actually come from Angelica Root? I’d not seen anything in her hand before. I held up the paper against the thin sun which was beginning to break through the clouds. I sniffed at the writing. I tried to decide whether it was in a woman’s hand – or a man’s. There was a firmness to the writing. But then, if the old nurse had penned it herself, the hand would have been firm. Nor was there anything special about the wording of the message except for a certain directness – again, typical of Mistress Root. I felt the texture of the paper, rubbing it loosely between my fingers. Unfortunately, as I was doing so, a gust of air lifted it from my hand. I made to grab it but it skittered out of reach and over the water, and the little piece of evidence connecting me to Mistress Root and the house in Cats Street disappeared downriver. It wasn’t much use that I could recall its exact wording.

  Well, if the vanished note had been written by someone else then that person could have had only one motive. To trick me into coming to Mistress Root’s house and once there to . . .

  I thought of the way the casement window had been left conveniently ajar, almost inviting me to climb in. I recalled the way in which the two “visitors” had let themselves in with the key and proceeded to go into the other rooms as well as upstairs before reaching the bedchamber. Were they looking for Mistress Root, since she might have expired anywhere in the house?

  Or were they looking for Nicholas Revill?

  There’s nothing to see, one of the hooded individuals had said.

  But there was something to see, there was a body lying on the bed in front of them. Did he say that before glimpsing the dead nurse, or were the two of them looking for another somebody?