by Alys Clare
‘It’s barbarous,’ Theo said, and I heard the suppressed fury in his voice, that one man – more than one man, probably – could be capable of this. ‘Why? They had rope and a tree, so why not hang him?’
Hanging could be as terrible, I thought but didn’t say, for unless there was a good long drop and a sharp jerk at the end of it, slow strangulation was the likely result.
‘He’d not have felt much beyond the first great exsanguin-ation,’ I said gently. ‘He’d have passed out, and been unconscious when his soul fled his body.’
Theo nodded. Then again he said, ‘But why this method?’
I hesitated, weighing my words. ‘Some religions specify that all meat consumed must be drained of its blood as the animal is slaughtered,’ I said eventually. ‘This is the method by which I believe the required result is achieved.’
‘They treated him like an animal.’ Theo’s outrage was flowing off him like steam. Then, as a yet more horrifying thought struck him, he said, ‘Dear Christ, Gabe, you don’t think they—’
I stopped him before he could finish. ‘No, Theo, I don’t think they had any plans to eat him.’ His relief was palpable, and it seemed a shame to stop it. ‘But I do, however, believe they had a use for his blood.’
He had paled again. ‘His blood?’
‘It’s not here.’ I indicated the circle of ground we had just examined. ‘We can be fairly sure this is where he was killed, for we have the evidence of the rope marks on his ankles and the other end of the rope, still tied around the branch. His blood ought to be here, right beneath where he was suspended, but it isn’t. The obvious conclusion, it seems to me, is that as they cut into his neck they held vessels of some sort in precisely the right place to catch the blood as it spurted or dripped out of him.’
‘Like the Holy Grail, which received the blood of our blessed saviour as he hung on the cross,’ Theo murmured.
‘Yes.’ I waited a moment, out of respect for the image he had just summoned. It seemed right, somehow, to invoke the presence of Jesus in this place of ghastly death. Then I said, ‘I believe I know what they wanted it for.’
Theo sighed. ‘Go on, then.’
‘Blood is the liquor of life,’ I said, thinking it out even as I spoke. ‘It has power, and in some religions it is venerated both in itself and as a symbol for vitality and strength.’ I paused, then said, ‘You were about to ask just now if they were planned to eat him, and I said no. But as I just said, however, they had something in mind for his blood.’
‘They— they were going to drink it?’ Once again, I thought Theo might be about to throw up.
‘Possibly, yes. I have heard tell of ceremonies where that is done. There are other uses, however.’
‘In God’s name, what?’ he demanded.
‘In magic rituals,’ I said softly. Then, for Theo was staring at me as if I’d taken leave of my senses, ‘If I’m not mistaken, this man is one of the fugitives from the ship.’
‘But how can you—’
‘The Falco has been in the Caribbean, Theo, where many have similar features. Life is harsh there,’ I hurried on, eager to put my thoughts into words, ‘and the islands and their peoples have a deep, dark, ancient heart. I know only a very little of what is done in the name of religion; of what rituals and ceremonies are performed away from the curious eyes of strangers. I have spoken with men and women who are revered in those lands, and I have been told much that I find hard to believe.’ I paused as one or two specific memories sprang to mind. ‘I have extensive notes back in my study at Rosewyke, and I will return there when we have finished here and see what I can find. For now, I suggest we bear the body over to your cart, cover him up as best we can and take him back to your cellar.’
Theo nodded. Walking back along the path, he called to the stable lad, who came running up, although the young man who had escorted us there kept his distance. The stable lad blanched a bit at the sight of the body, but gathered his courage and did as Theo commanded, and between the three of us we laid our burden on the flat bed of the cart and Theo draped a length of sacking over it.
One of the corpse’s hands was sticking out from beneath the sacking, and the stable lad picked it up and tucked it out of sight. I was just thinking it was brave of him when he uttered a soft exclamation.
‘What is it?’ Theo demanded.
The lad pointed a shaking finger. ‘Why is his skin all blue?’
In the high room at the top of the Plymouth lodging house, the youngest of the three men was pacing to and fro, to the clear annoyance of the sick man in the bed. He said tetchily, ‘Sit down. You tire me out with your restlessness.’
The younger man shot him an angry look, then swiftly wiped it off his face. He went to perch on the crude bench beneath the window beside the white-haired man.
‘So she has gone,’ said the sick man. He gave the younger man a glance of grudging admiration. ‘You use your eyes and ears well.’ Then, raising an eyebrow, ‘They have her?’
‘Undoubtedly,’ said the white-haired man. ‘They depend upon her’ – he shuddered and crossed himself – ‘and it can only have been dire necessity that forced them to leave her behind when they fled from the ship.’
‘Their dependency on that evil thing is their own fault!’ the sick man cried. ‘They turned away from the truth, and evil inevitably followed! They—’ But his words were choked off by a fierce bout of coughing. The white-haired man silently passed him a mug of water. He sipped, nodded, and wiped the spittle from his chin with a clean cloth.
‘But they did turn away,’ the white-haired man said softly, ‘and they were faced with the consequences, and in their terror they fled, and we had no choice but to follow.’ He glanced down at the sick man, a faint frown creasing his brow. ‘And you are not well, and we do nothing to ease your distress.’
‘I don’t need ease!’ the sick man protested furiously, coughing again. The others could hear the phlegm rattling and bubbling in his chest and the whistle of his breath. The white-haired man waited, glancing briefly at his younger companion. ‘And don’t you dare plot with him behind my back,’ the sick man went on as soon as he could speak. ‘We must only have dealings with the locals when there is no choice, and nobody – nobody – is to come close.’ He stared hard at them. ‘Understood?’
And slowly both men nodded.
The sick man closed his eyes. Presently he began to snore.
The younger man turned expectantly to the man beside him. Reverting to their own language – the sick man insisted that they used only the mother tongue of this alien land, even when there was nobody around to overhear – the white-haired man said very quietly, ‘I have accounted for one of them, although regretfully I did not learn anything from him. We have some difficult decisions to make, my friend.’ He shot a glance towards the bed. ‘He is in command, and our sworn duty is to obey. But …’ He left the sentence unfinished.
The younger man nodded. ‘But we have come so far, and our mission must not be put in jeopardy,’ he murmured.
‘It will not be,’ came the soft reply.
‘Then what should we do?’ the younger man pressed. ‘We are in the wrong place. They have her now’ – the white-haired man made a brief gesture with one hand, as if defending himself from the very mention of the thing – ‘and will not be lodging in the town.’
The older man nodded. ‘And it is far to go each day even on horseback, from here to the places where we must search.’
His companion did not reply straight away. Then he said, ‘Of the two men who went aboard the ship, the big man who rides the black horse is a doctor, and the other one – the broad man – is an official into whose care the dead are given.’
Again the white-haired man nodded. ‘We must—’
But with a snort and a bout of coughing, the man in the bed woke up.
SIX
I went back to Rosewyke.
The body was on its way to Theo’s cellar, Theo riding escort and the
young man who had come to fetch us riding on the cart along with the stable lad, whose fear was manageable with another living, breathing human being sitting beside him. The young man’s horse trotted along behind the cart, having displayed only a brief initial reluctance at being so close to a corpse.
I had decided that there was no need to carry out my inspection of the corpse straight away, for I was already almost certain how the man had died. Three things were calling me home: I knew there would by now be patients needing me, some of them urgently; I was itchy with impatience to be alone in my study and spreading out on my desk every single note I’d ever made on the subject of dark magic; and, perhaps most imperative of all, I hadn’t eaten since the hot roll Sallie had thrust into my hand several hours ago and I was ravenous.
Theo and I parted company at the turning for Tavy St Luke, and I watched for a few moments as he rode on towards home, the cart bumping along behind him. I glanced down at the village, and the church standing serene beside the green, tempted to pause and spend a few moments in silent prayer. It had been that sort of day, and I could have done with Jonathan’s company, even briefly. But I nudged my knee into Hal’s side, turning him towards Rosewyke, and he set off eagerly. Perhaps he was as hungry as I was.
It was twilight when I rode into the yard. Samuel took Hal from me, and I could hear Tock inside the stables, already busy making up a feed. I wished Samuel a brief good evening, then went inside.
‘Is my sister at home?’ I asked Sallie as she came to greet me.
‘No, Doctor, she is dining with her sewing circle and will not be home until the morrow,’ my housekeeper replied, in the sort of tone which said plainly, surely you haven’t forgotten?
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Any callers, Sallie?’
‘Three, but none of them needed you tonight and I said you’d see them in the morning.’ She rattled off the details.
‘Very well. I have work I must get on with and so please bring me some supper. A large supper,’ I added, ‘and a draught of your excellent ale.’
Up in the study, a fire was laid ready and I put a flame to it. The clear skies we’d enjoyed all day had continued as darkness fell, and it was going to be a cold night with a heavy frost. As the cheerful noise of burning wood broke the silence, I went to the shelves and the chests where I keep the journals of my days at sea and selected the first of the relevant volumes. I’d spent a great deal of time in the Caribbean over the years, and there were several notebooks to go through.
I had eaten my supper and worked my way through most of the jug of ale by the time I found what I was looking for. It was in my journal for the year 1595 – the year Francis Drake died – and the Falco had been in port on a small island between Hispaniola and Cuba, stuck there for more than a fortnight while repairs were made to a hole in her hull. With little to occupy me on board, I had taken an excursion up into the hinterland and encountered a man who claimed he could walk through the veil separating the living from the dead and commune with the ancestors.
He was old; or, at least, his body was old. He was shrunken, skinny, his limbs were skeletal and his dark skin was dried and wrinkled, hanging on his frame like a loose shirt. His wiry hair was white and his face was scored with wrinkles so deep they looked like crevasses.
His eyes, however, were bright, shining and alert; the eyes of someone in the first full power of manhood.
I sat in my study by a Devon river and read through what I had written, and I was carried back through time and across the wide Atlantic to the place where I had sat and listened to an ancient man who, while he spoke, cast a spell on me and made me believe everything he told me.
He had been taken from his West African homeland when he was a boy, brutally treated by the slave traders from the neighbouring tribe and made to march to the Gulf of Guinea, where he’d been loaded onto a ship with more than a hundred others. They had been transported across the sea and those who had survived – a little over half, he said – were sold on Hispaniola and put to work on the Spanish-owned plantations.
They had been torn from everything they knew and brought nothing of their former lives with them. Nothing material, that is; what did come with them, and what could not be removed from them by physical means, were their mystical, deep-rooted beliefs.
They believed in a supreme god: unknown, unknowable; too awesomely powerful for weak, humble men and women even to contemplate trying to approach. Underneath the omnipotent one were the spirits who controlled the affairs of the world and they were called the Loa; there were many of them and each had their own sphere of influence. Prayers were made to the relevant Loa, and offerings made of the vegetables and fruits preferred by that spirit on the spirit’s favourite day of the week and in the place of preference, in the hope that the Loa would look into the matter in question – perhaps to do with business, or love, or family concerns, justice, health – and decide in favour of the supplicant.
I’d made a note here: Not dissimilar to the former practice of praying to the relevant saint: St Anthony when you’d mislaid a precious object; St Roch when someone you loved was sick; St Jude when you’d tried everything else and were really desperate.
It was as well, I thought now, that my notebooks were not accessible to anyone but myself and, I supposed, my household, although Celia was the only member of it whom I could imagine having the desire to look. Read by unsympathetic eyes, my words might well translate as heresy. I decided it might be wise to remove them, so I tore out the relevant part of the page and put it on the fire.
Such is the mood of the times in which we live.
Feeling shaken, I refilled my mug and took a draught of ale.
Then I went back to my journal.
The old man had told me much about his healing methods and I’d made page after page of notes. I hadn’t understood all he said; we’d been speaking a basic form of Spanish, but he included many words I didn’t recognize and which I suspected were as likely to be from his own language, whatever it was. But I concluded that he believed a man to be made up of three distinct parts: first, the physical body; second, whatever force it is that animates flesh, sinew, bone and blood; and lastly, what I translated as personality, or awareness, and that gives us the understanding of who and what we are; the soul, perhaps. Chillingly, the old man told me that a practitioner such as himself had the ability to separate this third element from the living human being and store it away in an earthenware vessel. Leaning closer to me, he had whispered that it was possible to extract this – the essence of a person’s character and willpower – and he hinted that it could then be used to bend the person to the practitioner’s will.
It was chilling stuff.
I had asked him how it was possible to perform this extraction, and he had spoken of substances which I knew were highly toxic: matter extracted from a species of toad, and a powerful poison found in marine organisms such as the puffer fish. He also told me of something used by his brothers in the Yucatan – I hadn’t understood precisely what he meant by brothers, and concluded he referred to fellow priests, or practitioners of magic, or whatever term he used to describe himself – and which he called flesh of the gods. I’d gathered from the description that it was a sort of mushroom, and gave rise to startling visual and auditory hallucinations, and I’d wondered if it was by ingestion of these that he was able to wander through into the world of the ancestors.
I stood up to stretch, easing the cramp in my left shoulder. I crossed to the hearth, poking up the fire and adding fuel. I would be sitting there at my desk for some time yet.
The ancient sorcerer had described many more medicinal plants, not a few of which I had experimented with myself. I have always believed that the healing practices of other cultures should be investigated, even if the first reaction is quite often incredulity and disgust. I was following in worthy footsteps, for the king of Spain’s personal physician, Francisco Hernández, went to Mexico with the Conquistadors and wrote extensively on a substance c
alled ololiuqui, which he claimed was derived from the morning glory plant. Whether or not he used it in a preparation for his king, I do not know: he suggested it was a cure for flatulence, venereal diseases and in addition good at controlling pain, all of which qualities might or might not have been relevant to the king of Spain, but he also reported that it produced visions. I have always wondered if he spoke from personal experience.
I went on through my journal, presently finding a section where I had recounted various mutterings I’d overheard among the crew. They’d been bored, wanting to sail away from the island, suffering from the extreme heat and humidity, with little to do and too much time to relieve their boredom with tall tales and scary legends. One of the sailors had been told of a ritual in which a dead man had been brought back to life and, by magic, made to carry out the wishes of the sorcerer who had reanimated him. Another sailor echoed this, saying that he’d been told of something called vodou, and of people being reanimated as a punishment; ‘When by rights and all that’s holy and Christian,’ he’d added indignantly, ‘they oughta have been left peaceful in their graves!’ Yet another had been treated to a highly imaginative tale of a newly-dead corpse having the blood drained out of it, in the belief that the precious liquor was the very stuff of life and contained the dead man’s power, and how the blood once absorbed into the body of someone still alive would endow them with the qualities of the dead man.
I sat back in my chair.