The Indigo Ghosts

by Alys Clare

  Drawing rein and dismounting, I said, ‘Jarman, would you mind running up that slope?’

  He nodded, appreciating straight away why I was asking. He handed me his horse’s reins, then set off up the bank at a lope. I raised an imaginary musket to my shoulder and sighted along what would have been the musket ball’s trajectory. Upwards, at the sort of angle taken by the piece of lead in my dead man’s chest cavity.

  Jarman had only been jogging up the hill, and even so I’d had precious little time to sight and get off a shot, even supposing the weapon had been loaded and cocked ready to be fired.

  He was at the top now, looking back enquiringly at me. I beckoned to him.

  ‘It’s right for the angle of entry,’ I said as he re-joined me. I frowned. ‘Could you do it once more, Jarman? This time, running as if you’re fleeing for your life?’

  He did as I asked, turning and haring away up the slope so swiftly that this time I’d had to have had my musket primed and at my shoulder even as he was setting off in order to have any chance of hitting him.

  Jarman trotted back down to me, only slightly out of breath. He kept himself fit, I thought. ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘I couldn’t have hit a man and found his heart when he was fleeing away up that rise at speed. There was very little time before you were under the trees for one thing, and for another, you were sprinting, and therefore bobbing up and down.’

  ‘Hm.’ Jarman thought for a moment, then said, ‘Two things. One, the man who owns this house will have a large staff of servants to run it for him and, being a navy man, some of his staff are likely to be former sailors. And sailors in the navy are fighting men, so not a few of them will be proficient with a musket.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘And two?’

  He grinned. ‘Two, there’s always such a thing as a lucky shot.’

  I was struck by an idea … I gave Jarman Hal’s reins and strode up to the top of the rise, making a way on through the trees. I was already pretty sure I was right, and I broke into a run as the trees thinned and open ground appeared up ahead. The ground fell away before me and there, running along a couple of hundred yards away, was the river. I ran on, right to the top of the long, sloping bank, and through the wisps of mist rising off the water I could make out the promontory where we’d found the body and the tree from which the poor young man had been hung up.

  It wasn’t conclusive evidence that he’d been shot as he’d fled from Buckland Abbey, but it certainly pointed that way.

  I hurried back to Jarman and told him what I’d discovered. ‘Hm,’ he said. Then silently he jerked his head in the direction of the outbuildings behind the big house. ‘Someone’s spotted us,’ he said quietly.

  I turned to look. The gates to the wide cobbled yard stood open, and I saw movement. A young man was walking out of the yard, two older men either side of him. One of them said something to him, and the young man snapped a reply. It appeared that the older man was trying to stop him, for now he put a hand on the lad’s arm, but angrily the young man threw it off and we heard the colourful curse from where we stood.

  ‘Think we should melt away, Doctor?’ Jarman asked softly.

  ‘No. We have a right to be on this track, which is a public road even if it does pass too close to the house for the Drake family’s liking. Besides, you are a coroner’s officer in pursuit of lawful enquiries, and I’m-’ I stopped, at a loss to explain why being a physician gave me any authority in the present situation.

  Jarman grinned. ‘You won’t need to explain yourself, Doctor T,’ he said. ‘Everyone knows who you are.’

  While we waited for the angry youth to come striding up to us, I wondered whether Jarman’s remark was a compliment or an insult.

  I watched the lad as he covered the last few yards. He was short, broad-shouldered and a little plump, and the fine clothes he wore had an air of disarray, as if he’d been in a hurry when he put them on. He was bare-headed, his reddish brown hair thick and full. His eyes were dark beneath well-marked brows, his nose was long and well-shaped, his red lips still had the fullness of boyhood and it appeared he was attempting, not very successfully, to grow a beard. He was, I guessed, maybe fifteen or sixteen, and I was pretty sure I knew who he was.

  ‘Master Francis Drake?’ I said, stepping forward to meet him.

  He stopped dead. ‘How do you know?’ he said testily, the very words confirming his identity.

  ‘You have a look of your father and your uncle,’ I replied. The boy had been named for his famous relative.

  ‘You know my father?’ he demanded, disbelief in his voice.

  ‘I have had the pleasure of meeting him.’ And your uncle, I might have added.

  ‘So if I take you back to the house and march you before him, he will recognize you and give his permission for you to be—’

  Beside me I sensed Jarman Hodge’s habitual impassivity shift slightly. I was experiencing the same reaction, and I wasn’t nearly as good at disguising my feelings.

  ‘Enough,’ I said. The single word came out louder than I’d intended, but the lad was getting under my skin. ‘This track is not on Buckland Abbey land and we need no man’s permission to be on it.’

  ‘But you—’

  ‘Had you had the courtesy and the sense to ask our business, you would have learned that my companion is an officer of the Plymouth coroner, I am a physician, and we are here at the request of the coroner – whose name, for your information, is Master Theophilus Davey – and no-one may stand in our way.’

  I was all but shouting now, and found that I had edged closer to the boy and was looming over him. He looked cowed for a moment, stepped back a pace but then gathered himself and stood his ground.

  ‘Then I believe I have the honour of addressing Doctor Gabriel Taverner,’ he said, and he gave me a low bow. ‘I am afraid I do not know your companion’s name?’ He turned to Jarman.

  ‘Jarman Hodge,’ Jarman said neutrally.

  The boy bowed again. ‘My apologies, Doctor Taverner, Master Hodge,’ he said. ‘I will take you to my father straight away. I regret my impulsiveness but this is an out-of-the-way spot, we are a focus of interest for many vagrants, beggars and brigands, and when my father is from home, as he often is, it is my duty to look to the safety of my mother and my sister.’ He was swiftly recovering his composure – his arrogance – and, standing very straight, his chest thrown out, he added with feigned nonchalance, ‘Of course, I too shall frequently be away myself from now on. At Exeter College, Oxford.’

  I tried to suppress my smile and look impressed. Jarman didn’t bother.

  ‘Please,’ young Francis went on, ‘follow me. Someone will see to your horses.’

  Someone did; a couple of stable boys came running out as we walked into the yard, taking the reins even as they bowed to the young master; he hadn’t deigned to speak to the boys, merely waving a vague hand.

  That deeply annoying sense of entitlement is invariably the way of it when sons and daughters are born to privilege.

  Thomas Drake received us in the great hall of his magnificent house.

  His son had led us from the yard right round to the front of the house and its grand entrance, undoubtedly to make quite sure we took in all the details: the sturdy, forbidding porch, the granite doorway, the heraldic symbols of the Drake family: upraised glove, Drake arms, knight’s helmet. The great hall was ornately panelled, there were fluted pillars supporting a decorated frieze and, on the north wall, a vast granite fireplace. All echoes of the building’s austere monastic past had been thoroughly obliterated.

  The master of the house looked at me through narrowed dark eyes as his son muttered to him, presumably telling him who we were. Before the lad had finished his whispering, his father pushed him aside and strode towards me.

  ‘Gabriel Taverner!’ he exclaimed. ‘Yes, I knew I recognized the face! You were on the Mandragora, under old Ambrose Pemberthy, and my brother summoned you to our ship to take a man’s lower le
g off because everyone told him a man treated by you stood much the best chance of survival, and your methods got him back at his post the fastest!’

  ‘Thank you, Sir Thomas, for remembering me so favourably,’ I muttered. ‘Did the man survive?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ He glanced at me shrewdly. ‘But then I imagine you did not for a moment believe he wouldn’t have done.’

  ‘Survival is never a foregone conclusion,’ I replied, and perhaps there was a note of reproof in my voice, for the great man was actually looking slightly discomfited.

  He shook it off, giving a broad smile and opening his arms wide. ‘Welcome to my hall!’ he said. He spun round to his son, lurking in his shadow. ‘Francis, make yourself useful and see about some refreshments, if you please.’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ the lad exclaimed, running off as if relieved to be leaving his father’s powerful presence.

  ‘Now, you are here on the coroner’s business?’ Sir Thomas said, indicating a trio of settles close to the fireplace and inviting us to sit down.

  ‘Yes. Jarman Hodge here is Theophilus Davey’s senior and most experienced agent’ – it was true, even if nobody ever mentioned the fact – ‘and I am regularly summoned to aid in the coroner’s work.’

  Sir Thomas nodded sagely. ‘Dead bodies, of course.’ Then all at once his expression sharpened, and something very slightly threatening entered his genial tone. ‘And what brings you to my door?’ he asked softly.

  ‘The very same,’ I replied. ‘A dead body, found on the river bank half a mile away.’

  Sir Thomas regarded me steadily. ‘And what is the connection to Buckland Abbey?’

  ‘The man was killed by a musket ball.’

  ‘You are certain?’

  ‘I am. I removed it from his body myself. He was shot in the back,’ I added.

  There was a pause while Sir Thomas considered this. Then, shaking his head as if in regret, he said, ‘I am sorry to appear obtuse, Doctor Taverner, but I must ask again: what is the connection to my house?’

  The honest answer would be, because the dead man is one of a group who hid on board an English ship and returned clandestinely to Plymouth. They slipped onto this ship in the Caribbean, almost certainly in Hispaniola, and now one of them has been found dead close to your house while a second has been badly injured trying to climb the back wall of Sir Richard Hawkins’s house in Plymouth. And since you, your late brother Francis and Richard Hawkins all spent years in the Caribbean, the connection speaks for itself.

  I very nearly spoke up.

  But something held me back. I was all at once very aware of Jarman Hodge beside me, and while he did nothing so obvious as clear his throat, nudge me or in any other way issue a warning, yet I felt the message emanating as powerfully from him as if he’d spoken the words: Don’t tell him.

  Since it precisely echoed my own sentiment, I kept quiet.

  Then, for Sir Thomas was clearly waiting for my answer, I said, ‘Proximity, Sir Thomas.’

  ‘And, I would hazard, proficiency with a musket?’ he added quietly.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I replied.

  He thought for a moment. ‘It is true that we tend to be a focus for the needy and the desperate, for times are hard and too many are driven to travel the roads and throw themselves on the mercy of the more fortunate. But they know they may obtain relief here, Doctor Taverner!’ He opened his eyes wide in an expression of earnest piety. ‘The house was once an abbey, and we follow the old practice of doling out food to the hungry. It is rare for there to be any threat from those who depend upon our bounty, for we are very well protected and our defences are strong, and the idea of anyone in my household feeling the need to shoot at someone …’ He smiled, leaving the sentence unfinished as if to underline the absurdity of the very suggestion.

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Thank you, Sir Thomas, for the reassurance.’ I stood up, and Jarman instantly did too. ‘Now we must be on our way, for—’

  But by unfortunate timing, for I was itching to leave and I was sure Jarman felt the same, the boy Francis came rushing back into the hall followed by no less than three servants bearing trays of food and drink.

  The servants fussed about pouring the wine – which proved to be delicious – and setting out little bread rolls filled with cheese and ham. I contrived some polite small talk while the wine and the little rolls were consumed, and then at last Jarman and I managed to take our leave.

  Our horses were led out to us – they had also been well cared for; it was clear that every task in Sir Thomas Drake’s household was performed to a high standard – and we mounted up, spurring our mounts, and hurried away.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ I asked Jarman. We were some miles on our way now and we had slowed down a little.

  ‘Sir Thomas Drake himself didn’t fire that shot,’ Jarman replied.

  ‘I agree,’ I said.

  ‘But,’ he went on, ‘that’s not to say someone else in his household wasn’t responsible.’

  I was about to say I agreed with that, too, when he added, ‘And I’d put a small wager that Sir Thomas probably knew all about it.’

  Now that was a surprise. ‘You would? Why?’

  Jarman considered the question. Then he grinned. ‘Nothing, really. Nothing more than the instinct that’s saying loud in my ear that a former pirate made good and living a rich man’s life in a grand house, son at Oxford, well-bred lady wife giving him respectability, isn’t going to welcome some skinny ghost from his Caribbean past. Is he?’

  ‘No,’ I said heavily. ‘He isn’t.’

  We had reached the bifurcation where one track led away to Theo’s village and the other on down to Plymouth. Jarman Hodge had clearly been deep in his own thoughts, and I had been reflecting on the man who had been attacked by Richard Hawkins’s dogs. Jarman, noticing I had brought Hal to a stop, looked enquiringly at me.

  ‘I’m going to see what I can find out at the Hawkins residence,’ I said.

  Jarman nodded. ‘I’ll tell Master Davey,’ he said impassively.

  Jarman Hodge is a man who never asks unnecessary questions.

  As I rode down towards the port, I went through what I knew about Sir Richard Hawkins.

  He was a fine example of a thin skin of respectability painted over a questionable past. His grandfather William Hawkins had been one of Plymouth’s wealthiest merchants, serving two terms as mayor of Plymouth by his mid-thirties. He abandoned civic duty to sail to the Guinea coast for pepper and ivory, and to Brazil for the wood of the trees that produce a highly prized red dye. There was a Portuguese monopoly on trading with Africa and South America but William Hawkins simply pretended it didn’t exist, and his insouciance earned him both fame – or possibly infamy, especially among the Portuguese – and vast wealth.

  William Hawkins’s son John lived as a young man in London, where rumour had it he’d murdered a man by the time he was twenty-one, returning to lead a trio of ships to the Guinea coast. This time the cargo was not merely the luxury goods that his father had traded in but included some nine hundred slaves. He led his small ships across the Atlantic to Hispaniola, where there was a constant hunger for slave labour, and was paid in the sort of goods for which England in her turn was most eager: gold for the Queen, pearls for the throats of rich men’s wives, and ginger, sugar and hides for those who could afford them. King Philip of Spain protested vehemently to Queen Elizabeth at this foreign intrusion on his Caribbean empire, but the Queen sided with her Sea Beggar and Hawkins’s wealth increased accordingly.

  John Hawkins’s son Richard endured captivity and imprisonment at the hands of the Spanish for almost a decade, subsequently rising through the ranks and becoming an admiral a year ago; he had also served as mayor. His wife had just presented him with a son, and, although he had purchased the house out at Slapton, he lived for most of the time in his late father’s fine house in Plymouth.

  It was this house for which I was bound.

  I was in the town now, forging a w
ay through the crowds, the noise and the stench towards the more affluent area where the Hawkins house was situated. I found an inn and left Hal in the care of the ostler.

  I walked past the front of the house: timbered, with a double gable, three upper stories of small-paned windows in the jetty, stout oak door within an elaborately carved stone doorway, presently very firmly closed. I strolled on, turning down the side alley that bordered the house and coming to the wall surrounding the rear of the property.

  The alley was overshadowed and dark, and very narrow. There was nobody about; no sound from either of the streets each end of the alley or from the house or garden. The rear windows, like those at the front and the door, were tightly closed and not a light shone from within.

  I looked up at the wall. It was well-made, with only the minimum indentations between the bricks. It rose high above my head and I could not reach the top with outstretched fingers. I searched for something to stand on, for, unless the man who had managed to scale the wall last night was extraordinarily agile or able to fly, he would have needed a stone, or a discarded box, or—

  Or a broken barrow.

  And an example of the latter was lying on its side at the end of the passage where presumably it had been kicked aside.

  I fetched it and positioned it at the foot of the wall. Then, in some trepidation as to whether it would support my weight, I stepped up onto it. There was an ominous creak of strained old wood, but the barrow held together.

  Now I could reach the top of the wall. I took a firm grip, then pulled myself up. I scraped with my boots for a toe hold, and soon, panting hard, my heart beating rapidly, I had the upper part of my body across the top of the wall.

  The enclosed space before me was some eight or ten paces long, and the width of the house. A door in the back wall of the house opened into it and it was overlooked by a number of windows. There was a low lean-to built into the angle between the wall and the rear of the house, and the presence of some large bones and quite a lot of dog excrement suggested it was a kennel. Fastened into the wall beside it was a large iron ring, probably for tethering the dogs. One dog lay dozing inside the kennel, its nose resting on its huge paws, and the other was standing absolutely still immediately below me, its eyes fixed on me and a very low, rumbling sound reverberating in its deep chest.