by S. W. Perry
And then he remembers Quigley reading from Elise’s testament in John Lumley’s study: Lord Lumley asks the child if the Devil manifested himself to her. Her reply: ‘No, sir, he did not.’ Elise Cullen hasn’t seen the face of the killer. But nor has the killer seen hers.
And then another thought occurs to him: what if the note is a lie? It could be nothing more than a morsel of bait laid to lure him here. The Jesuit might appear a gentle fellow on the surface, but the brave words he spoke in the Lumley chapel will bring him little ease in the face of martyrdom on the scaffold. With Nicholas dead, Francis Deniker would be safe.
But try as he might, Nicholas can’t cast Francis Deniker in the role of assassin. And anyway, if it is a trap, he’s forewarned. The priest is no match for a Suffolk yeoman’s son.
Cautiously, he opens the door and enters the mews. There’s a soft rustle of feathers as the birds wake from their sleep. They make a strangely gentle sound, these creatures of talon and razor-sharp beak. Like cats meowing. Has he disturbed their dreams of aerial slaughter – or do they just think he’s come to feed them?
Shafts of moonlight penetrate the unshuttered windows. Scattered across his path are streaks of white mute – hawk-shit. The birds stand upon low wooden blocks like executioners waiting for a commission. They watch him with fierce yellow eyes that hold no discernible emotion other than the desire to kill. One of them hops down onto the ground, skips to the limit of the long leather cord that secures him by one leg, spreads his wings and disgorges a small pellet from his beak. Nicholas can smell a pungency of digested shrew and mouse, of coney flesh, of blood and gore. He thinks, thank God these birds don’t work for the Cecils, or we’d all be dead.
The storeroom lies at the end of the mews, almost invisible in the darkness. Nicholas feels his way along one wall, past shelves containing the paraphernalia of the falconer’s world: punches and shears for cutting the leather jesses that hang from the birds’ talons, imping needles for repairing broken feathers, rolls of padding and wire for the construction of bow perches. Reaching the end, he stumbles over a knee-high pile of dusty sacking, before recovering his balance and trying the storeroom door.
It’s unlatched and ajar.
‘Deniker, are you there?’ he calls softly. ‘It’s me, Nicholas – Nicholas Shelby.’
The only reply is a short, unearthly mewling from one of the falcons. He calls again.
Still no reply.
Nicholas pushes the door open a little further. It yields into utter blackness. A musty smell from within reminds him of the ancient threshing barn on his father’s farm in Suffolk. It comforts him, helps keep his breathing calm. He steps cautiously inside, almost blind in the darkness.
And as he does so, he senses a sudden disturbance in the night air – the sleepy stretching of a hawk’s wing somewhere behind him. He turns to look back over his shoulder, assuming Deniker has entered the mews.
And then a blinding white light floods into him. The moon has fallen from the sky, crushing him, forcing his senses into the unyielding Surrey clay, driving him down into black nothingness.
41
What if Shelby is lying to us? He’s done so before,’ says Lizzy, sensing John shifting fitfully in the darkness against the bolster of the great bed. ‘We can’t let him destroy us, Husband. Not after all you’ve been through.’
‘I trust him to keep his word, Mouse. I think he’s an honest man.’
‘Who lied to you from the very beginning!’
‘That’s not true – he swore there was no deceit in his first letter, remember?’
‘And you believe him? A man who works for Robert Cecil?’
‘He does not work for Cecil. He was coerced by him. I thought you liked him.’
‘I thought him charming when he came here. Now I’m not so sure.’
‘Did you not witness him with Elise, Mouse? Those weren’t the actions of a man whose soul is chained to the Cecils’ ambition.’
‘But there’s something about him – I fear he may carry chaos in that smile of his.’
‘Hush, Mouse. Sleep awhile.’
‘How can I, when all I can think of is what might yet happen to you and Francis, if he’s lying? And when I’m not thinking of that, I can’t free myself from imagining how that poor young girl has suffered – her brother and the others, too.’
‘Nicholas Shelby is an honest man, Mouse. From what he’s told us, has he not grieved enough to win your trust?’
Lizzy sits bolt upright in bed. ‘You’re right. I need to lay these fears of mine to rest. I shall start with a clear conscience – I’ll have Francis hear my confession.’
‘Now? It’s not even dawn, Mouse,’ John says, turning over yet again. ‘Give the poor man his rest. Let him hear what’s in your soul when the sun is up. Our sins are easier borne in the light.’
Bianca stands in the physic garden, pale as death in the pre-dawn moonlight. She’s come to hear her thoughts. It’s easier to do so here.
Beyond the garden wall looms the black bulk of the Lazar House. She wonders if Nicholas is right – is this really where the man who killed young Jacob Monkton goes about his monstrous business? If so, he couldn’t have chosen a more fitting place.
But there have been no more bodies washed up on Bankside since Nicholas left – save for a customer from the Good Husband who’d decided upon a swim after an injudicious three quarts of stitch-back. Perhaps the killer has moved out of the parish. Perhaps he’s discovered a conscience. Perhaps he’s died.
And where is Nicholas now? she wonders. Is he asleep in some goose-down bed in fabled Nonsuch? Does he share it with Lady Katherine Vaesy?
She reaches down and rubs her fingertips over the winter herbs. And as she savours the rich aromas that cling to her skin, for the first time since she planted them they bring her not comfort, but a dreadful premonition.
It is some indeterminate time since the moon fell in on Nonsuch. It could be one minute; it could be one hundred years. Nicholas cannot be certain.
He is lying on the storeroom floor. Waves of pain ripple through his body. The stench of old straw and hawk-mute assaults his confused senses. He can see nothing. The darkness seeps into him, filling him from his extremities inwards, so that he doesn’t know where the darkness ends and his skin begins. Is this how death comes stealing up? he wonders.
Then he hears the rasp of a bolt sliding home. It’s followed by the agitated striking of a flint against steel. A thin glimmer of light appears, low down near the floor where he thinks the corner of the door might be.
With his sense of time fractured, he thinks the dawn must be breaking.
The light brightens – and the back of his throat catches the first sharp stab of smoke.
42
Young Tom Parker, Lord Lumley’s apprentice falconer, wakes to the impression that someone’s boot has just brushed the edge of his mattress.
He sits up, bracing himself for a cuff to the head for neglecting his duties. He should be in the mews, keeping watch over Lady Lumley’s merlin, Salome. The hawk has recently fallen victim to sour crop. It needs a small medicinal feed every three hours. Falconer Hilliard has arranged a rota, and as usual Tom has drawn the night watch. Being the apprentice, he always draws the worst jobs – like scrubbing the mutes off the floor or disposing of the half-digested mouse carcasses when the birds are off their food. But it’s cold in the mews tonight and Tom doesn’t have a coat of feathers to keep him warm. A hearthside mattress in Master Sprint’s kitchen is a far more agreeable spot in which to rest between visits.
Tom is not lazy. He did not mean to fall asleep. Indeed, until a couple of hours ago he’d hardly had the opportunity. Whenever anyone had entered the kitchens, the cry had gone up: ‘Have you heard the news? Betony has spoken! Master Sprint heard her with his own ears!’
The details of exactly what Betony has spoken are still hazy. Tom has heard the most implausible stories: that the girl has admitted to being the daughter of a Spanish
noble drowned with the Armada, and that she’s wandered here from Devon where her father’s galley was wrecked; that she’s the love-child of the Bishop of London; even that she’s Lord Lumley’s bastard daughter returned to the fold. With all this excitement going on, Tom Parker is surprised he’s managed to shut his eyes at all.
He’s already muttering a sleepy apology before he realizes falconer Hilliard is not standing over him, demanding to know why he’s not at his post. Whoever’s foot it was that woke him, it must have belonged to someone else.
Looking around in the hearth-light, he sees the kitchens are still, the scullions snoring peacefully nearby. The only movement is a fleeting shadow in the far corner, someone slipping out into the corridor beside the door to the buttery. Gathering his wits, Tom hurries out into the icy yard to bring Salome her medicine – just in time to see the fiery glow spreading at the far corner of the mews.
Close. Almost too close.
Nicholas stands precariously on the cobbles of the kitchen yard on legs that appear to belong to an infant who hasn’t yet learned to walk. He takes great gulps of clean, cold pre-dawn air. Above his head the stars appear to dance in long silver ribbons. Tears stream down his cheeks from the acrid sting of the ash in his eyes.
And then everything becomes increasingly fractured and untrustworthy. He has but a blurred impression of John Lumley in his nightshirt, telling the assembled crowd that if King Henry’s architects hadn’t put a well and a hand-pump in the kitchen yard, this could all have ended very badly indeed. He catches the blur of Lizzy Lumley’s face, pale and suspicious, as she asks what he’s doing skulking around the mews at this time of the night. He sees indistinctly Gabriel Quigley staring at him, with even more loathing burned into his pocked face than before.
He captures only fragments of the walk back into the palace and what follows: Sprint’s great arms supporting him… the icy splash of water against his skin and the smell of wild clary as one of the Nonsuch women bathes his eyes with a soothing tincture… someone easing him back against the comforting bolster of a bed and pulling the covers over his chest…
After that, nothing. Not even dreams.
It will take till mid-morning to entice Lord Lumley’s peregrine, Paris, down from one of the Nonsuch minarets with the offer of a particularly bloody slice of beef. Even then he will sit reluctantly on Hilliard’s glove and glare at poor Tom Parker, as if to say, It’s all your fault.
The bird has the most powerful wings of all the Nonsuch hawks. If he hadn’t been one of the first out of the mews when Tom opened the door, the apprentice swears he might never have heard the hammering of a fist against the storeroom door.
The pale light of late afternoon spills over the casement like the dying flow of a dammed-up stream. Nicholas wakes, convinced his lungs are trying to claw their way out of his chest. When the retching subsides, the physician in him goes to work.
First he’ll need the juice of purslain seeds. That will ease the burns in the throat. Then priest’s pintle and hoarhound, to bring up whatever debris the smoke has carried into him. It’s what he would have prescribed for the men he’d tended in the army of the Prince of Orange when they’d inhaled too much of the smoke of battle. There’s bound to be a medicine chest somewhere in Nonsuch.
For the rest of it, including the drum-roll of pain when he touches the back of his head and feels the hardness of hair matted with dried blood, he wishes Bianca were here with her theriac. At least the wash of wild clary that the Nonsuch maids used to clean the soot from his eyes has done the trick: he can see well enough.
Not that Nicholas needs the faculty of sight to know that Nonsuch has suddenly become a very dangerous place for him. Whoever has tried to kill him is still at large. They might try again. He leans back against the bolster. His brow is clammy with sweat.
How can I have been so stupid? he asks himself. Why did I blunder into the mews, certain that Francis Deniker was no threat? He flails himself with recrimination. But then he thinks: I can’t prove Deniker wrote the note. It could have been someone else entirely. An awful thought assails him: there’s another at Nonsuch with a motive to silence me. What if the master of Nonsuch himself was behind the attempt on my life?
John Lumley might seem like a cultured man of learning, but Nicholas knows – from all Robert Cecil has told him – that in the past the courtier has gambled for very high stakes indeed. Perhaps the hand that wrote the words I know who killed the maid’s brother and the others wasn’t Francis Deniker’s at all, but John Lumley’s.
Lumley is alone in his privy chamber when Nicholas is shown in. He sits in a high-backed chair by the fire, his mournful brows knitted in concentration. There’s a slim leather-bound book open on his knees and a pair of spectacles perched on the bridge of his long nose. In his black gown he looks like a Northumbrian abbot in a wintry Lindisfarne cell.
‘Marcus Aurelius, the Meditations,’ he explains. ‘Printed in Heidelberg. Greek into Latin. Not particularly accurately, I fear. I’m gladdened to see you alive, young man.’
‘I was lucky, my lord,’ Nicholas says, suddenly aware of a hoarseness in his voice.
Lumley waves the book at him as though it were evidence in a lawsuit.
‘Aurelius tells us we are foolish to be surprised when bad things happen, or to weep when we suffer loss. He says it is wiser to expect these things and find the bravery to bear them. But as far as I can tell, he says nothing about going in search of them. I assume your presence in the mews at the dead of night was not happenstance, Dr Shelby? Or have you discovered a sudden unaccountable interest in falconry?’
‘No, my lord.’
‘Then what were you about, sirrah? You were somewhat incoherent when we found you.’
‘I was there because of a note, my lord, apparently from Master Deniker. It was pushed under my door during the night.’
‘This?’ Lumley asks, taking a fragment of paper from the folds of the book. ‘We found it in your chamber when we carried you there.’
One glance confirms it. ‘Yes, my lord, this is the note. But the words on it are a lie. That’s not why I was lured to the mews.’
‘And the true reason is?’ asks Lumley, frowning.
‘Because last night someone panicked when I mentioned I’d seen the bodies washed up on Bankside, when I said I knew Elise Cullen’s testimony to be true. That person decided the safety of their secret required my immediate death – however risky that might be.’
‘Do you comprehend what you imply, Dr Shelby?’
‘Yes, my lord,’ says Nicholas firmly. ‘It means someone here is involved in the killings. It must be Francis Deniker, Gabriel Quigley, Lady Elizabeth or you.’
Nicholas can scarcely believe what he’s said. Barely hours ago it would never have occurred to him. Can it possibly be? Is John Lumley – the patron of physic, the man of medicine, the collector of dangerous books – behind the drained and eviscerated carcasses washing up on Bankside? Is this dour, studious man sitting before him responsible for a series of ghastly pseudo-medical experiments carried out on the living? Has John Lumley killed, merely to satisfy his unbounded hunger for new knowledge?
For a long while Lumley says nothing. Then he slips the note back into the Aurelius. ‘I can see now why Robert Cecil chose you, Dr Shelby. You have an inquisitor’s tenacity about you.’
‘I take not the slightest pleasure from it, my lord.’
‘Yet you wish to add murderer to the list of accusations my enemies would hurl in my face.’
‘Not unless I have to, my lord.’
Lumley’s long, grey face colours with anger. ‘Shelby, if I’d wanted you dead, it would have cost me less money than Lady Elizabeth makes me spend on firewood for a single hearth! I could have had you waylaid on the ride back to London. Why in the Lord’s name would I make a confection of notes and assignations at the dead of night?’
‘That’s what I’ve asked myself several times, my lord.’
John Lumley slams
his fist down on the Meditations. ‘God’s blood, Shelby! You have brought me pain indeed by coming here.’
Nicholas stands firm. ‘Through no desire of my own, my lord. But I have found myself caught up in a tempest. And no matter how much I might wish it, I cannot stop the wind from howling.’
Lumley closes his eyes and exhales, purging himself of rage. He says, ‘God has not yet made a storm that does not eventually abate, Dr Shelby.’
‘Indeed so, my lord. But how many more innocents will have to die before this one does?’
With a weary shake of his head, Lumley says, ‘At least one. We found Francis in his chamber this morning. It seems he didn’t trust your assurances. He’s hanged himself.’
43
Halfway down Black Bull Alley the front wall of the Magdalene almshouse sags out into the narrow street. An open sewer borders it like an insanitary moat. Bianca can smell the place from a hundred yards away. The front door is open. An old woman in a grubby, patched woollen kirtle sits on the step peeling vegetables with a blunt knife, her face raked with ancient furrows.
‘Is the overseer here?’ Bianca asks. ‘I wish to speak to him.’
The woman looks up. One of her eyes is glazed milk-white. There’s an abscess under the other the size of a half-angel coin. ‘If he is, he’ll be dead-drunk in his cot, snoring like a leviathan,’ she says, glancing to the far end of the almshouse where the overseer’s official dwelling spills out from the wall like a ruinous cattle byre. Bianca thanks her and leaves the old woman to her paring. When she reaches the place, she has to lean across the open drain to peer in through the tiny window. The squalid chamber is empty. On her return she asks the old woman, ‘Do you know when he’ll be back?’