The Indigo Ghosts

by Alys Clare

  I didn’t want to talk about bodies, or sickness, or fugitives, and my intelligent, perspicacious sister realized it and instead entertained me with a lively and very funny account of the brother of a matchmaking friend of hers who, persuaded by his well-meaning but unobservant sister that Celia was in need of a new husband, had been trying to woo her.

  Having dismissed him and his suit in a few short but devastating sentences – I hoped she’d been kinder and less abrupt when she’d spoken to the poor man than she was when she related the exchange to me – she sat back for a while in a reflective silence, absently twirling her crystal wine glass. Then she said casually, ‘Isn’t it time we invited Jonathan to dine with us again?’

  SEVEN

  I was very busy the following morning, with four existing patients to review and three new ones to call upon. I returned to Rosewyke at noon, determined not to let another day go by without so much as a morsel of food to sustain me between breakfast and dinner, to find Sallie in the yard waiting for me.

  ‘Oh, there you are, Doctor!’ she said with a hint of reproof, as if my absence had been due to some boyish lark rather than the pursuance of my duty. ‘I was on the point of sending Tock to look for you!’

  I glanced across at Tock, whose mouth had fallen open in horror at the very thought of such a mission. Tock works hard, is loyal and has been with my family since he was a boy, but even we who are fond of him would not credit him with anything in the way of initiative, and I was at a loss to think how Sallie thought he might have gone about searching for me in the wide area of countryside in which my patients reside.

  ‘Don’t worry, Tock,’ I said, ‘I’m here now.’

  He gave me a lopsided, toothy grin and melted away before anyone could ask another impossible task of him.

  ‘What is it, Sallie?’ I asked.

  ‘A message from Plymouth, Doctor.’ She screwed up her eyes, presumably to aid her memory, and rattled off, ‘Captain Colt of the Falco requests your urgent presence because something has turned up at the bottom of the barrel.’ She opened her eyes again. ‘Now don’t go asking me which barrel, or what’s been discovered, because I’m sure I have no idea,’ she went on primly, spoiling the effect by adding in a whisper, ‘I don’t suppose you could make a suggestion or two, Doctor?’

  I knew which barrel, although out of respect for her sensitivities I wasn’t going to share the knowledge with her. As to what had been found … it could be virtually anything, but the pressing nature of the summons suggested it wasn’t a horn button or a chicken bone.

  ‘No, Sallie,’ I said. ‘Now, if you will kindly cut me some bread and cheese, I will set off again and eat as I go.’

  The disgruntled crew of the Falco must have overcome their abhorrence, for they had completed the ghastly task and the barrel now stood on the open deck. As Captain Zeke led me towards to it, I deduced from the lack of smell that it had not only been emptied but also swilled out.

  ‘There’s nothing in it now,’ Captain Zeke said. There were several muttered comments from the men, standing around in a loose semicircle, generally to the effect that the barrel’s empty state was entirely due to them and nobody had been nearly grateful enough.

  ‘All right, all right,’ growled one of the senior officers – a tough-looking individual with half of one ear missing who went by the name of Sebastian Waldington – ‘you’ll get your reward later, lads,’ and he nodded towards the large cask of rum that sat on top of the stack of supplies.

  ‘This way, Gabe,’ Captain Zeke said curtly. He strode on past the barrel, the assembled crew parting to let us pass, towards the aft, where something lay on the deck covered in sacking.

  I stared down at it. I still hoped very much that what lay beneath the sacking would be nothing more than a dead dog but I had little faith that the hope was going to be fulfilled.

  I sensed the men moving to re-form their semicircle, this time with a new focus. Captain Zeke nodded to one of them – it was Willum, the tall, scarred man with the tattoos – and he reached down and twitched the sacking aside.

  Instantly a powerful stench of putrefaction rose up.

  The body lay on its left side and was tightly curled in a foetal position, knees up to the chin, arms wrapped around the thighs. The skull bore vestiges of long hair, some of it braided into a thin plait. Much of the flesh had rotted from the face, giving the illusion that the lips had been drawn back in a howl. A few teeth remained, long, brown and fang-like. The short spine was curved like a bow, and the limbs were stumpy.

  ‘It’s not a child, is it?’ someone said. Turning, I saw that Sebastian Waldington stood beside me.

  ‘No. Look at the teeth.’ As I pointed he leaned closer, and gave an exclamation of disgust as he accidentally inhaled the stink. ‘This was an adult,’ I went on. ‘A man, I think, but I need to examine the corpse more closely.’ I looked enquiringly at Captain Zeke, who nodded.

  I crouched down over the body. ‘This was found in the barrel?’ It was all but unbelievable.

  ‘It was,’ Sebastian Waldington affirmed. ‘Willum, tell the doctor.’

  I looked up at the tattooed man, then straightened up so that we were face to face. He was even taller than me. ‘If you please, Willum,’ I prompted.

  He seemed to be in a daze, and it took him a moment or two to focus on me. He looked … puzzled, was the word that sprang to mind. He opened his mouth a couple of times as if trying to form the words, then shook his head violently, tried again and said, ‘It was bad down there. Towards the end, we had to change the order of the chain every few minutes, since not one of us could bear to be delving down into that barrel for long.’ He shuddered. ‘It wasn’t just the smell, it was something else.’ He shuddered again, his whole body briefly convulsing. ‘It was like someone was trying to hold us back. Some of the lads said they could hear moaning, or keening. And some of us saw things,’ he added, dropping his voice so that I barely heard him.

  He, I understood in a moment of clarity, had been one of the latter. ‘What did you see, Willum?’ I asked softly.

  He turned, meeting my eyes. His were wide with remembered horror. ‘A face. It was a woman, and I thought at first she was beautiful, but then she wasn’t, she was old, unbelievably old, and then the middle of her face changed and it came poking out towards me, and she had a crocodile’s snout where her nose ought to be and then it—’ He stopped abruptly.

  There was no need for him to go on. I knew what he had seen, for I’d seen it too. I touched his upper arm, hard with muscle. ‘It wasn’t real, Willum,’ I said firmly.

  He shot me an incredulous glance. ‘Looked real to me,’ he muttered.

  ‘There is some substance down there in that far hold that acts on the mind, producing auditory and visual hallucinations,’ I said. Seeing that he didn’t understand, I added, ‘Visions, and imaginary sounds.’

  He went on staring at me and I sensed I hadn’t begun to convince him.

  ‘This substance gives off a scent, a perfume,’ I went on, ‘and—’

  There was a harsh, disbelieving laugh from the man standing next to Willum. ‘A scent?’ he said scathingly. ‘Doctor, have you any idea what we were breathing in down there? Right from the start it was bad enough, but by the time we were nearing the bottom of the barrel it was all but intolerable. D’you think we’d have been able to smell perfume?’

  I nodded, acceding the point. ‘No, I’m sure you couldn’t,’ I replied. ‘All the same, it was having its effect on you. It was an awful task,’ I pressed on before anyone could argue with me, ‘and I admire the resolution with which you stuck to it.’ They’d had no choice, of course, since it had been the captain himself who gave the order, but it did no harm to show some appreciation. ‘But there was something in the air, whether you could detect it or not. I noticed it when the hiding place was first discovered.’ Remembering the piece of cloth I’d saved from the first little corpse’s garment, I resolved to examine it as soon as I was back at Rosewyk
e. I tried to recall what I had done with it, hoping I’d put it away somewhere safe.

  Beside me, Captain Zeke emerged abruptly from whatever had been absorbing him. ‘You’ll be wanting these remains taken to the coroner’s house,’ he said. ‘Willum, cover the corpse again, and you, you and you’ – he pointed to the three sailors closest to Willum – ‘help him get it off my ship.’

  The four men leapt to obey, and in a very short time they had the corpse covered, on a length of plank and on its way.

  There were always carters touting for business on the quay. Willum collared one, the corpse was loaded on to the cart and, having fetched my horse, I went ahead to alert Theo. He was as amazed as I had been to learn that a body had been found in the barrel.

  He looked at me dubiously. ‘Have they cleaned it?’ he demanded.

  I hesitated. ‘It’s possibly had a bucket of sea water sluiced over it.’

  He stood up. ‘Then we’ll not have it here,’ he said very firmly. ‘Get the carter to go to the empty house.’

  Earlier in the year, Theo had formalized his arrangement to use the crypt of an uninhabited house up the road, and now he paid rent for the privilege. He had been heard to complain at the money he was obliged to part with, but the advantage of not having stinking, putrefying corpses underneath the house where he and his family lived would, I reckoned, have been worth twice what he was paying.

  Theo and I helped the carter to unload the corpse, still on its plank, and we put it down in the yard behind the empty house while I paid off the carter. As we heard him in the lane outside whistling to his horse and setting off back to Plymouth, Theo was already at the pump, filling up the pail that stood beside it. I removed the sacking, and we took it in turns to throw pail after pail of water over the body until most of what had covered it inside the barrel had been washed away. Despite our efforts, however, it still stank of shit, and now the stench of rotting flesh was adding to the effect.

  Theo sighed. ‘We’d better get him down into the crypt.’

  He stayed with me, honourable man and good friend that he is, while I performed my examination. I am accustomed to bad smells, and I usually find that becoming deeply absorbed in whatever task has ordained my close proximity to a stinking body helps me to overcome the natural repugnance. Theo, however, did not have a medical man’s resilience, and as I worked I frequently heard him dry-retching. But he did not complain.

  Presently I stopped. There was more to do, but I reckoned I had found the cause of death, which was what Theo needed to hear. I would tell him, I thought, and he could make his escape.

  ‘Come up into the fresh air,’ I said, leading the way up the steps. We emerged into the yard, and Theo took some deep breaths.

  ‘Well?’ he asked. He still looked pale.

  ‘The body is that of a man, advanced in years and probably over sixty,’ I began. ‘There are clear signs of ill-usage: he has been worked extremely hard, and I found what looked like the scars of the lash on his back.’

  ‘A sailor?’

  ‘Probably, yes.’ If I was right about his age, and his teeth and the state of his bones suggested I was, then he could have been at sea for getting on for half a century. Boys of twelve or even younger were commonly recruited for ships’ crews.

  ‘And what killed him?’ What small colour that had returned to his face drained away again as he added, ‘He wasn’t shoved alive into that barrel, was he?’

  ‘No.’ I was reasonably confident of what had killed him, and in any case it was hard to imagine his companions selecting that particularly awful death for one of their number. ‘He was sick. I believe he died of his illness.’

  Theo muttered a prayer. ‘Thank God,’ he breathed. ‘What was it, then, this sickness?’

  ‘Have you heard of scurvy?’

  ‘Er – I think so.’

  Briefly I described the symptoms. ‘It’s thought to be caused by some element lacking in the diet,’ I went on, ‘partly because a sharp increase in its incidence cropped up around the time ships began to be at sea on the world’s great oceans – and thus denied access to fresh food – for longer and longer stretches.’

  ‘Can it be cured?’

  ‘Yes, provided a sufferer is not too far gone. More importantly it can be prevented, by dosing the crew with a daily intake of the right medicine.’ I smiled.

  ‘No doubt foul-tasting and stinking like that corpse?’

  ‘Not in the least. Relatively pleasant, in fact: oranges, lemons or lime, either the fruit or the juice.’

  Theo thought for a moment. ‘And this man wasn’t given any,’ he said.

  ‘He’d almost certainly been sick even before they set out, so I would imagine the scurvy affected him swiftly and very gravely,’ I said. ‘He was malnourished and his body was worn out.’

  ‘So why was he in the barrel?’ Theo asked, then, before I could speak, he answered his own question. ‘Because after he’d died he begun to rot, and the stink was bad enough down there already, so they put him in with the – with the waste.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘There was, I suppose, little option.’ For his companions couldn’t have done what men at sea normally do, and put his body over the side, without being discovered. They probably hadn’t seen the sea and the sky and breathed the clean air for days, if not weeks, by the time the old man died, shut up as they were in their self-imposed incarceration deep within the ship.

  ‘Poor bugger,’ Theo murmured.

  We were both briefly silent, as if in recognition of the old man’s suffering. Then I said, ‘Theo, the lad in your cellar had scurvy too.’

  He nodded. ‘Stands to reason. If they’d been part of the same group, they’d have shared the same conditions.’

  ‘True. Unlike the man in the crypt, however, the younger man would have recovered.’

  ‘Had someone not fired a musket ball into his heart and then drained him of his life’s blood,’ Theo said heavily. Then, turning away and heading for the gate, he added, ‘We need to get to the bottom of this, Gabe. It is monstrous.’

  I returned to the crypt to finish my examination, but I found nothing of note except for the fact that, like the lad who had been exsanguinated, this corpse too had blue hands and forearms. Then I covered the old man’s body with the sacking and left him.

  I rode home via the village, calling in to see Jonathan. He was not in his house and, noticing the hour, I guessed he was in church. I would have liked very much to go and hear evensong, but I had work to do. I left a note for him asking if he could come with me to the Falco during the afternoon of the next day to perform his cleansing ceremony, then left.

  Celia noticed my distraction and, as soon as we had eaten, said she was retiring to her room to finish a piece of embroidery. I bade her goodnight, then went straight to my study.

  I found the fragment of cloth precisely where I’d remembered I’d put it, tucked away in the leather roll in which I keep my instruments. I took it out, spread a piece of clean parchment on my desk and smoothed out the cloth on top of it.

  I held the light right over it and stared at it. Whatever substance had stained the white cloth was golden in colour, darkening to brown where the concentration was most intense. I had detected the perfume as soon as I had taken it out of the instrument roll, and now, leaning over it, I breathed it in deeply.

  And immediately wished I hadn’t been so incautious, for my senses were swimming, there were stabs of pain in my head, bright white flashes of light popped before my eyes and, just for a heartbeat, I had an image of the woman’s face with the crocodile snout.

  I leaned back in my chair, my eyes closed, while these powerful symptoms slowly faded away.

  Then I drew forward my notebook, dipped my quill in the inkhorn and began on my observations. In summary, these were that the substance was slightly tacky to the touch; that there seemed to be slight crystallization at the edges of the largest area of staining; that the perfume was a little like incense but also smelt o
f leaves, or possibly grass; plant or vegetable matter of some sort.

  I went over to my books, drawing out a volume describing the use of herbs in healing. I found nothing bearing any similarity to whatever had soaked into that piece of cloth. I knew I needed the advice of someone better versed than I in traditional remedies, and with a flood of pleasure that quite surprised me, acknowledged that I had the perfect excuse for riding over to visit Judyth Penwarden.

  She lives in a tidy little house near the village of Blaxton, where the ferry crosses the Tavy, and as I arrived early the next morning I caught her about to leave it; I had only just raised the heavy, angel-shaped door knocker when the door flew open and there she was.

  Her dark hair was smoothly bound up beneath an immaculate white cap, over which she had drawn up the deep hood of her heavy cloak. The day was bright but very cold with a hard frost and she had clearly dressed for it, for her gown was of thick wool and she had wound a long scarf round her throat. Her light eyes looking up at me held the habitual hint of amusement, as if she was well aware of some interesting fact that I could only guess at.

  ‘Doctor Gabriel!’ she greeted me with a smile. ‘What brings you to my door so early on a chilly October morning?’

  ‘Not too early, I hope?’

  ‘No indeed, for as you see my day has already begun and I am on my way out.’

  ‘Have you time to spare for a brief consultation?’

  Now her smile widened and she laughed. ‘I am a midwife, Doctor. Can it be you have confounded nature and God’s laws and find yourself carrying a child?’

  I was not sure whether she intended her remark to have the potently sexual undertones that I picked up; given how attractive I found her, these could well have existed only in my own head. ‘Er—’ I began.

  She took pity on me, taking hold of my arm and ushering me inside, closing the door firmly behind me. ‘I apologize, Doctor,’ she said. ‘The jest was in poor taste. What did you wish to talk to me about?’