by Alys Clare
No. The fugitives could only have slipped aboard after the storm, which meant Hispaniola: the western end of the island, to which the ferocious winds had blown the helpless Falco.
Celia had turned her attention back to the map, apparently willing to take my word for it. ‘Here, then.’ She tapped the western end of the long, thin island. ‘So, what were they doing there, and why did they want to get to England?’ A thought struck her, and she said, ‘Gabe, what are the penalties for hiding on board a ship?’
‘I can’t think that it often happens, but if it did, and if the people hiding were discovered, then death, I imagine,’ I replied. ‘Likely to be straight away, as soon as they’ve been dragged out from their hiding place.’
‘And there would be no alternative?’
‘Oh – perhaps the illicit passengers might be put to work in payment for their passage, but I doubt it. The more humane captains might hang them, or possibly shove them over the side.’ I’d once heard a rumour of that having happened in the eastern Mediterranean.
‘Without even the vestiges of a trial?’ she asked coolly.
‘They’d already be guilty because of where they were,’ I pointed out. ‘Their reasons for being there are irrelevant.’
‘I see.’ She nodded.
‘What are you thinking?’ I asked when she didn’t speak.
She turned to me. ‘Isn’t it obvious? The men who stowed away on the Falco must have known how terrible the voyage would be and how unlikely it was that they would survive it, hidden away down in the dark depths of the ship, even without a storm trying to sink them. Furthermore, they must also have been aware what would happen if they were discovered. Dying on the way was far more likely than reaching port and managing to get safely ashore in England, yet they took the risk.’ She paused, looking at me expectantly.
‘So whatever drove them to do what they did, it must have outweighed the ghastly prospects of the voyage itself, or of being discovered and put to death,’ I said.
And, with a small smile, she said, ‘Precisely.’
FIVE
The lump on the back of my skull was throbbing in time to my heart by the time I went to bed and it would be hard to sleep, so I availed myself of Judyth’s powdered herbs. The preparation worked like a charm, and I fell deeply into unconsciousness as if I’d been hit all over again.
I didn’t even dream, or not that I recalled.
I awoke because someone was shaking my shoulder and calling out my name. ‘Doctor Taverner!’ said a man’s voice from close beside me. ‘Doctor!’ came shrilly and repeatedly from the foot of the bed, and, ‘Gabe! Gabe! Wake up, it’s late!’ from somewhere just behind whoever was shaking me.
I rolled onto my back and opened my eyes.
Jarman Hodge stood over me, with Celia beside him. Sallie stood at the end of the bed holding a large jug of steaming water.
‘What?’ I bellowed, making them all take a swift step backwards. I shouldn’t have shouted, but I’d been dragged from profound sleep, I was disorientated and feeling embarrassed at still lying in my bed when the angle of the sun shining brightly through the window told me it was already mid-morning.
I sat up, realizing as I did so that my sore head wasn’t sore any more. ‘I took Mistress Penwarden’s sleeping draught,’ I said in explanation. ‘It was rather more potent than I anticipated.’ That was all I was going to say on the matter, and to demonstrate the fact – and to remind these people just whose house this was and who was in charge here – I turned to Jarman Hodge and said, ‘What brings you to Rosewyke, Jarman?’
He had retreated a further step and now, looking decidedly sheepish at having just been shaking me, he stood up very straight and said in his most detached and formal tone, ‘Message from the coroner, Doctor. He says to tell you the body’s gone.’
‘The body …’ It took me a moment to catch up. ‘The body in his cellar? The one from the Falco?’
‘That’d be the one, sir.’
‘Gone?’
‘Gone.’
I looked round at the three faces: Jarman’s expression was impassive (which is his usual demeanour), Celia looked as if she had a dozen questions to ask, which I was quite sure she did; Sallie’s eyes were round with fascinated horror.
‘Leave me,’ I said to them, with the imperious tone of an autocratic monarch. ‘Is that water for me, Sallie?’ She nodded, holding it out as if to demonstrate its reality. ‘Then please wait for me downstairs, Jarman, and I will return with you to Master Davey’s house as soon as I have washed and dressed.’
Sallie insisted on giving me a hot roll spread with bread and honey to eat as I rode, and Celia hissed as I strode out of the door, ‘You must tell me what you find out, Gabe!’ I thanked Sallie, muttered ‘Of course,’ to my sister, hurrying out to the yard to find Jarman Hodge mounted and Samuel, my outdoor servant, holding Hal. Hoping that the sense of unreality would soon wear off and I’d catch up with myself, we clattered out of the yard.
‘We didn’t hear a thing,’ Theo said with a scowl.
We were standing either side of the trestle where the little corpse had lain. The table was bare, and the length of cloth I’d removed from the head had also disappeared.
‘How secure is your house?’
‘The front door and the one out to the yard are locked and bolted at night. I do it myself.’
‘I’m sure you do. What about the windows?’
He hesitated. ‘The one in the scullery’s ill-fitting and the frame is rotten – I keep meaning to have it seen to, Elaine complains of the draught – and it’s possible to open it from the outside.’
‘Show me?’
He led me up the steps and turned to his right, down the passage leading back through the house. He opened the yard door – it was as stout as the front door, and there was a lock with a huge iron key as well as bolts top and bottom – and took me down a passage along the side of the building. He stopped, pointing up at a little glazed rectangle some five or six feet off the ground.
I reached out and pushed it. It held for a moment, so I pushed harder and it flew open.
I turned to stare at Theo. ‘This window?’ I asked disbelievingly. It really was very small.
‘It’s the only possible access. I know, Gabe, but there is no alternative!’
He was right, for the windows of the upper chambers were far above our heads.
Both of us turned back to the scullery window.
It measured perhaps a foot by a foot and a half.
I could have got my head and perhaps one shoulder into the aperture, although whether I’d have extracted myself again was doubtful. Theo probably wouldn’t even have managed the shoulder.
‘A child?’ he suggested.
I nodded. ‘Your Carolus could slip through there, although we’d have to give him a leg-up.’ Carolus is ten years old.
‘Then we’ll assume the lad had an accomplice. So he runs through the house, light on his feet, nips down into the cellar and picks up the corpse.’
‘First replacing the headdress,’ I put in.
‘Yes, yes,’ Theo said impatiently. ‘Then he passes the body to whoever’s waiting the other side of the window and follows it out.’
‘How would he reach the window on the inside without someone to lift him up?’ I demanded.
‘Easy. There’s a stone sink runs along beneath it, he’d have stood on that.’
Without a word we turned and strode round to the door, and Theo went ahead to the room from which the little window opened. There was the stone sink, and, just as he had said, it made a convenient step for someone intent on climbing out.
If anything, the aperture looked even tighter from this side.
‘Could it be done?’ I murmured.
Theo’s answer was to step through the door into the passage and holler, ‘Carolus!’
The boy appeared far too rapidly for him to have been upstairs with his mother, bent over his school books, where he was meant to be;
he had evidently been standing just inside the door that separated Theo’s workplace from his family living quarters, and the lad was too young to disguise the fact.
‘Father?’ he said, looking up at Theo with the same bright blue eyes, his wearing an expression of exaggerated innocence.
Theo gave him a long, assessing look, then said, ‘Do you think you could climb through that window if Doctor Taverner goes round to the other side to catch you?’
The boy’s face lit up. ‘Really? I’m really to do it?’
‘You are.’
Not giving his father time to change his mind and rescind this unlikely order, Carolus jumped up onto the sink, took a firm grip on the window ledge and hauled himself up, coming to rest with his head and shoulders through the gap and his chest resting on the sill. ‘Gabe!’ Theo shouted in alarm, and, equally taken aback at how quickly the boy had responded, I raced outside and positioned myself below the window. Carolus grinned down at me.
‘It’s all right, Doctor, I don’t really need you,’ he whispered. Then in an even softer voice: ‘I’ve done this heaps of times before.’
I’d suspected as much. ‘I won’t tell,’ I whispered back.
I watched, ready to leap forward and catch him as he insinuated the rest of his lean body through the window. But he was right, he didn’t need me. Keeping firm hold of the window frame, somehow he wriggled himself round so that he was feet first, then extended his arms until his feet were only ten or twelve inches off the ground and let go. He landed easily, brushed some fragments of rotting wood from his hands and gave me a grin.
‘Well done,’ I said as we went back into the house.
‘Have I been helpful?’ he said eagerly.
‘Very,’ I replied. ‘Your father and I had a bet as to whether it was possible,’ I said. For clearly he wanted an explanation, and I was reluctant to tell him we feared someone had gained access to the sleeping household.
He smiled in satisfaction. ‘I don’t think you could have done it, Doctor Taverner,’ he said politely. ‘And as for my father …’ He rolled his eyes.
I suppressed a grin.
‘Thank you, Carolus,’ Theo said. ‘Now, back to your books, if you please. And close the door,’ he added pointedly as the boy sprinted away.
‘He managed it easily,’ I said when Theo and I were alone.
Theo stared at me, clearly expecting more. Not wanting to betray his son’s confidence, I merely said, ‘I think you should get that window fixed as a matter of some urgency. If one person managed to get into the house that way, others could too.’
Theo nodded. ‘Yes, I’ve already sent one of the men to fetch the carpenter. Look what I found while you were outside.’
Relieved that Carolus’s secret was safe, I bent over the sink to where he was pointing. Scattered at its base were the same flakes of rotten wood I’d just seen on Carolus’s hands.
‘Could your son’s exit not have made them?’ I asked.
‘Carolus went out through the window. I’d wager, wouldn’t you, that these resulted from someone coming in.’
We went back through to Theo’s office, and he threw himself down in his chair. ‘Think it was the uninvited passengers from the Falco, come to reclaim what they left behind on the ship?’
‘Who else?’ I replied. ‘For one thing, only a handful of people knew the corpse was here. For another, who else could possibly want to steal it?’
‘Well, if nothing else, it proves they were human and not the ghosts conjured up by the ship’s company,’ Theo muttered.
‘Oh, they were human all right,’ I said. ‘We were discussing them last night, Celia and I, and—’
‘What did Celia think?’ Theo interrupted. He has a high opinion of my sister, which is no surprise since his choice of wife indicates a preference for strong, intelligent women.
‘We studied a map showing the Falco’s recent voyage and came to the conclusion that the fugitives must have slipped on board before the ship left her last port of call, which was at the western end of Hispaniola. I’d planned to return to the ship this morning, in fact, to see what Captain Zeke thinks of the idea.’
‘Good, good, don’t let me stop you,’ Theo said. He sighed gustily. ‘I have a desk loaded with matters awaiting my attention’ – he waved an arm over the stacks of papers and files – ‘and now the ancient corpse of a very old woman has been stolen from my cellar and I have absolutely no idea who she was, who stole her and what in the good Lord’s name they propose to do with her.’ He gave me a rueful smile. ‘If you discover anything the least bit helpful, Gabe, please don’t hesitate to share it with me.’
He came out to the yard to see me on my way; I guessed it was a means by which to postpone tackling those stacks of paper for a little longer.
But I was not to make it to Plymouth that day, for as I mounted Hal and turned his head to the open gates, there came the sound of a horse being ridden hard towards us. Theo pushed past me and stood in the road, and the horseman – it was a young man of perhaps fifteen or sixteen – pulled his sweating mount to a halt.
‘Body’s been found,’ he panted, pushing a lock of damp hair out of his eyes. His face screwed up in an expression of distaste, fear, I wasn’t sure. Looking into the yard, he saw me and instantly looked relieved. ‘That the doctor?’
‘It is,’ Theo and I said together.
The young man crossed himself, muttering a prayer of thanks. ‘We need him and all,’ he said. ‘Will you come with me, now, straight away?’
Theo’s stable lad, observing from the rear of the yard, was already busy. By the time Theo had hurried back inside to fetch his cloak and his cap, his thick-set mare was ready. He gave some brief orders to the stable lad to prepare the horse and cart and follow after us, then he mounted up and the young man put heels to his horse and set off back the way he had come. He set a fast pace – something had clearly upset him – and Theo had to tell him to slow down, for the cart coming along behind us needed to keep us in sight so as to know where to go. In silence, – I didn’t feel like talking, and clearly Theo didn’t either – we rode on.
We kept up a reasonable pace for the best part of four or five miles, the cart jolting along behind us with the stable lad at the reins, heading roughly north east and passing the turning for Tavy St Luke and Rosewyke, away to the left. Then abruptly the young man slowed, taking a lane that led off to the west and that, I was fairly sure, headed down towards the river. We were near to Buckland, where my friend the retired doctor Josiah Thorn lives, and as we descended to the riverside, I wondered if we were close to his habitual fishing place beneath the old willow trees.
Now the boy was following a narrow track down by the water, and presently it rose once more, leading up to a small promontory that jutted out over a bend on the river; the water was undercutting it, and in time it would collapse under the constant pressure. A tall, graceful beech tree stood a few paces back from the edge, and beneath it lay the body.
There had been some attempt to dig a grave. It was flat on its back in a scrape of hollowed-out earth, with what looked like a few handfuls of soil covering its feet and legs. All three of us dismounted and I handed Hal’s reins to the young man. He kept his distance – presumably he’d already had sight enough of what awaited us – but Theo and I advanced until we stood over the body.
It was that of a man, quite young, with a shock of black, curly hair and a scrappy beard. The eyes – wide open – were very dark brown. The nose was wide and quite flat and the lips were full. The mouth gaped hugely as if in a silent scream.
The body was naked. The man – perhaps he was more accurately a boy, but I was uncertain of judging age when it came to people of mixed blood – was big-framed but very skinny, his ribs standing out sharply under the taut skin and the bones of his pelvis jutting like two hills either side of the shrunken belly. His legs were long, and as I brushed away the earth to examine his feet – bare, like the rest of him, large and wide across the spre
ading toes – I noticed something. It tallied with another factor I’d already observed, and I looked up, immediately above me, and that seemed to make it certain.
I returned to his head and neck, feeling the ground beneath him and then widening my search into a broad circle all around the place where he lay.
‘What are you looking for?’ Theo asked very quietly.
‘Blood.’
He muttered an oath, then bent down to help me, working in the opposite direction until between us we had completed a circle with a radius of roughly four or five feet, its centre by the body’s feet, our spread hands patting the earth and the grass as if one of us had lost a precious jewel.
Theo straightened up. ‘I didn’t find any. It hasn’t rained for a few days, and the ground is quite dry, so it’d be easy to find blood if it were there.’
I nodded. ‘No, I didn’t either.’ But I hadn’t expected to.
I returned to the corpse.
What had they done to him? Well, I knew, or thought I did; the more pertinent question was why they’d done it, and I had a horrible suspicion that I might know the answer to that too.
Theo was watching me. ‘Share your thoughts, Gabe.’
I turned to glance at him. ‘They are deeply unpleasant ones,’ I warned. I was trying to spare him; all the time I kept my conclusions to myself, Theo could go on believing it was an ordinary, sunny October day, that we might be standing by a recently-deceased boy but he’d died of natural causes, all was reasonably well with the world and we’d all go home that evening to a good dinner and a cozy evening by our hearths.
‘Tell me,’ Theo said, and now his voice had changed and carried the weight of his authority and his ancient office.
‘He was suspended by his ankles from the branch just above us,’ I said. ‘Here is where the rope cut into his flesh’ – I bent down, Theo did too, and I showed him the red grooves just above the feet – ‘and up there you can see the end of the rope, still tied around the branch.’ Theo followed the line of my arm and pointing finger. ‘Then someone took a very sharp knife and made two very deep cuts either side of his throat, opening the big tubes that carry blood to the brain.’ I reached down and gently opened up the cut on the right side, pushing its sides apart so that it gaped up at us. Theo made a faint retching noise, but he controlled himself. ‘I doubt there is much blood left in this poor boy’s body,’ I went on. ‘If the heart was still beating when the cuts were made, its action would have pumped out blood like a fountain. Then when it stopped, whatever remained would have simply drained from the corpse.’